Following the announcement of Nvidia's holiday games bundle that pairs Ubisoft’s titles with new GeForce GTX graphics cards, AMD today announced the offering a free copy of the Civilization: Beyond Earth game with its latest Radeon hardware. The promotion is separate from AMD’s existing Never Settle: Space bundle but still, it can be combined with that, meaning that buyers of a new Radeon R9 290, R9 290X, or dual-GPU R9 295X2 can walk away with Civilization: BE and three additional games of their choice.

AMD also announced an overclocked variant of its flagship R9 290X graphics card that doubles the previous amount of onboard memory to 8GB.

Firaxis Games and AMD have been collaborating on Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth for many months. The game utilizes AMD’s Mantle API to increase frame rates in traditional PC setups by optimizing how the CPU talks to the GPU, and create a smoother gameplay experience in multi-card Crossfire setups by using a "split frame rendering" subsystem. This subsystem assigns each graphics card a portion of each frame to render, rather than having the cards alternate rendering of entire frames.

The Civilization: Beyond Earth’ heavily uses GPU memory, so AMD also announced a new, overclocked R9 290X variant with 8GB of onboard RAM. More memory onboard essentially offers the ability to handle higher antialiasing settings at ultra-high resolutions.

Sapphire, PowerColor, and MSI will be the initial hardware partners, with a soft target MSRP of $429.