Ubisoft has recently announced plans to decommission servers for 15 games on September 1st 2022 removing any multiplayer functionality and limiting access to downloadable content for certain titles. The games set to lose their servers include several Assassin's Creed titles for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the Wii U alongside Anno 2070, Far Cry 3, Rayman Legends, and more. These games are mostly older releases except for the VR multiplayer shooter Space Junkies that was launched in 2019.

UbisoftClosing the online services for some older games allows us to focus our resources on delivering great experiences for players who are playing newer or more popular titles. To help us achieve this, a number of older titles will be added to our list of decommissioned online services on 1 September 2022.

Ubisoft's Far Cry series has seen a lot of installments that were remembered as very good and enjoyable experiences. Today, Ubisoft decided to surprise new gamers and invite them over to the Far Cry series by offering PC gamers the ability to purchase Far Cry 3 free of charge. On Ubisoft's Connect PC platform, gamers can obtain their digital copy of Far Cry 3, and experience the open-world first-person shooter that the game represents. The offer, to obtain the game's digital copy, is already available and you should head over to Ubisoft's Connect platform here. It will expire on September 11th, just two days from now.

AMD released a WHQL-signed version of its Catalyst 14.4 software suite, its first in four months (the previous one being 13.12 WHQL). The driver builds on the Catalyst 14.4 Release Candidate the company shipped out a little earlier this month, to lend immediate support for Radeon R9 295X2, which hit the shelves on the 21st. The four highlights of Catalyst 14.4 include support for the R9 295X2, CrossFire frame-pacing improvements for a number of games, full support for OpenGL 4.4 API, and bug-fixes for AMD Mantle API.

Among the games AMD worked to improve CrossFire performance of, include Crysis 3, which sees improved frame-pacing; Far Cry 3, which sees improved 3-GPU and 4-GPU scaling; Anno 2070, which sees an overall CrossFire scaling improvement of 34 percent; Titanfall, which sees reduced game flickering an micro-stutter; and Metro: Last Light, which sees 10 percent improvement in CrossFire scaling. The driver also addresses bugs related to 3x1 Eyefinity setups using three Ultra HD displays. For gamers running Battlefield 4 with its Mantle renderer, AMD addressed the performance slowdown seen when switching windows using Alt+Tab; and fuzzy textures when playing the game on rotated displays.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 14.4 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Visa 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit

Here it is, the first public beta of AMD Catalyst 14.1, featuring Mantle, AMD's 3D graphics API designed to rival Direct3D and OpenGL. The driver enables the Mantle renderer on Battlefield 4, which is known to enhance performance on certain GPUs based on AMD's Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture. The driver can't be installed as an upgrade to an existing driver, which must be cleanly uninstalled first. In addition to Mantle, Catalyst 14.1 beta resolves rendering issues on a boat-load of games.

If Battlefield 4 crashes as soon as you go to options, disable your integrated graphics in BIOS or device manager.DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta 1.6

The change-log follows:

AMD released the second edition of Catalyst 13.8 Beta driver suite, marked by "V2." The drivers bring with them a bucket-list of game specific performance improvements, beginning with up to 25 percent on Saints Row 4 at 1920 x 1080 and Ultra settings enabled; up to 9 percent on Splinter Cell: Blacklist at 2560 x 1600 and Ultra settings; improvements on single-GPU and CrossFireX performance with Final Fantasy XIV; improves single-GPU performance on RIPD; CrossFire performance on Minimum and Castlevania Lords of Shadow.

Catalyst 13.8 Beta V2 also fixes image quality issues with Van Helsing, display corruption when enabling anti-aliasing through Catalyst Control Center, for Far Cry 3 and FC3: Blood Dragon; random corruption issues on Doom 3 BFG Edition, and CrossFire frame-pacing issues with World of Warcraft, Sniper Elite, Watch Dogs, and Tomb Raider.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta V2

AMD's recent free SimCity game bundle with most A8- and A10-series sub-$150 APUs baffled analysts, particularly with how AMD is bundling a gift with market price of $60, with products starting at $80. It looks like certain AMD add-in board (AIB) partners are striking similar deals with EA. A case in point is Sapphire, which decided to bundle the game with a special edition Radeon HD 7790 graphics card, which for now appears to be a Japan-exclusive. We're not sure how the SimCity inclusion affects the Never Settle bundle eligibility of the card, which should also fetch its owners Far Cry 3, and a 20% discount coupon for Medal of Honor: Warfighter. We don't imagine Sapphire to price its card significantly higher than its stock trim. The card itself looks identical to the HD 7790 2 GB the company recently announced, albeit with just 1 GB of memory, lacking a back-plate, and featuring reference AMD clock speeds of 1000 MHz core and 6.00 GHz memory.

ASUS today announced the Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, a dual-GPU offering derived from 28nm AMD Radeon graphics processors. With twin GPUs based on AMD Graphics Core Next technology and 6GB GDDR5 video memory, the ASUS Radeon HD 7990 easily handles the most demanding DirectX 11.1 PC games in ultra settings and resolutions above 1920 x 1080.

It is also ready for ultra HD 4K video, delivering the finest graphics performance and the convenience of a standard 2-slot height. With two GPUs factory-paired on the board, customers only require one free PCI Express 3.0 slot without needing to use AMD CrossFireX multi-GPU bridging.

Game bundle wars between NVIDIA and AMD have been a one-sided contest in favor of the latter, with AMD bundling the hottest AAA titles with its Radeon hardware, compared to NVIDIA offering in-game currency on popular free-to-play games. Following news of AMD stepping up its "Never Settle Reloaded" with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon on all GPUs upwards of Radeon HD 7750, we've learned that NVIDIA is frantically responding by preparing to give away Metro: Last Light with all GeForce GPUs upwards of the $200 GTX 660. The bundle will go live from April 16th.

AMD made an addition to its "Never Settle Reloaded" game bundle. Everyone who has already redeemed "Never Settle Reloaded" for their AMD Radeon products, will receive keys to activate Ubisoft's newest FPS title, FarCry 3: Blood Dragon, by e-mail. Those with unused coupons will automatically receive the game, when the coupons are redeemed. They keys will be given out by May 1st.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a standalone game, and an expansion pack in-principle to Far Cry 3. You don't need to own the original to play Blood Dragon. It gives you a single-player campaign that's completely set apart from the Far Cry universe, and features a retro-futuristic, exploitative B-movie setting, which is interesting and never tried out by a game studio in the last decade. A little earlier this month, AMD vice-president Roy Taylor announced that Battlefield 4 will be part of the company's next "Never Settle" bundle.

AMD posted a performance-enhancing beta version of its Catalyst driver suite, version 13.3 Beta 2. The driver provides across the board performance improvements of up to 5 percent in Far Cry 3, up to 16 percent in Sim City 5, reduces frame-time latencies noted in Tomb Raider (2013), and Hitman Absolution; and corrects a slight display corruption issue noted with TressFX enabled in Tomb Raider (2013), on both CrossFire and single-GPU setups.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2

Specifications of NVIDIA's upcoming high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX Titan, which were reported in the press over the last couple of weeks, are bang on target, according to a specs sheet leaked by 3DCenter.org, which is allegedly part of the card's press-deck. According to the specs sheet, the GTX Titan indeed features 2,688 out of the 2,880 CUDA cores present on the GK110 silicon, 6 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface, and draws power from a combination of 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

The GeForce GTX Titan core is clocked at 837 MHz, with a GPU Boost frequency of 876 MHz, and 6.00 GHz memory, churning out 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The chip features a single-precision floating-point performance figure of 4.5 TFLOP/s, and 1.3 TFLOP/s double-precision. Despite its hefty specs that include a 7.1 billion-transistor ASIC and 24 GDDR5 memory chips, NVIDIA rates the card's TDP at just 250W.More slides and benchmark figures follow.

OCZ is giving away copies (U-play keys) of the hit first-person shooter title Far Cry 3 to new and existing owners of its Vector 256 GB and 512 GB solid-state drives (SSDs). A page has been set up where owners of the drives can enter purchase details of their drives to redeem their keys. Based on its newest Indilinx silicon, the Vector line of SSDs is OCZ's fastest in its consumer lineup.

AMD rushed out a new beta version of its Catalyst driver suite, which addresses the issue of improper performance scaling on the new 3DMark, on CrossFire multi-GPU setups. The new Catalyst 13.2 Beta 5 adds a CrossFire profile for 3DMark v1.00 launched on Monday (04/02). Along the way, it also introduced a couple of performance improvements in some highly specific scenarios. For systems running Far Cry 3 at 2560 x 1600 pixels, with 8x AA, performance could go up by 10 percent. With a refined profile, the driver could dole out up to 40 percent higher performance in Crysis 3, on CrossFire setups.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 5

For those interested in taking Crysis 3 Open Beta (multiplayer) for a spin, NVIDIA released the new GeForce 313.95 Beta drivers, which addresses known issues, and is features optimizations for the game. NVIDIA expects performance increments as high as 35 percent. The driver also packs performance enhancements for other AAA titles, such as SLI and single-GPU performance gains of up to 27 percent with Assassin's Creed III, up to 19 percent for Civilization V, up to 14 percent in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, up to 14 percent in DiRT 3, up to 11 percent in Just Cause 2, and up to 10 percent each in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, F1 2012, and Far Cry 3.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 313.95 Beta

NVIDIA's GeForce Experience game settings optimization tool opened up to beta testing by the public at large. The software is designed to make PC gaming as effortless as console gaming, when it comes to getting the best experience out of available hardware. The tool detects your GeForce hardware, installed games, and suggests the best settings for your games given your system specs, which can be applied with one click.

GeForce Experience went open-beta with the release of a new version of the software, v1.0.1, which expands its list of supported games to include Far Cry 3, Mechwarrior Online, and Hawken; improved game detection logic, support for more CPUs (Core 2 series), playable settings for the new 2560 x 1440 resolution, translations to more languages, and numerous bug fixes.DOWNLOAD: GeForce Experience 1.0.1 Beta

AMD today announced its collaboration with Ubisoft to support the highly anticipated next chapter in the "Far Cry" franchise, "Far Cry 3," launching today in North America. Developed in conjunction with the AMD Gaming Evolved program, "Far Cry 3" is fully optimized for a premium PC gaming experience, harnessing the power of AMD Radeon graphics including native support for AMD Eyefinity and AMD CrossFire technologies, enabling industry-leading multiscreen experiences and high-performance gaming. By working closely together, AMD and Ubisoft have enhanced the "Far Cry 3" experience, allowing gamers to become fully immersed in an epic struggle to survive in one of the most lawless and challenging PC gaming environments to date.

"AMD and Ubisoft have worked together to make 'Far Cry 3' a state-of-the-art gaming experience on the PC, the world's most powerful gaming platform," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit, AMD. "The AMD Gaming Evolved program aims to put gamers and developers first, and we're making sure we deliver on our promise. By working with industry-leading developers like Ubisoft, we're not only helping to develop cutting-edge titles, we're also advancing the state of PC graphics for gamers."

AMD has now made available an updated version of its Catalyst 12.11 graphics drivers. Known as the Beta11, this latest release features all the goodies of previous Catalyst 12.11 Beta builds and brings improved performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (the newly-released AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)

To download the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 and Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 see this page.

Just as enthusiasts are beginning to test their hardware with Far Cry 3, and the GPU-toasting visual marvel that it is, NVIDIA released a driver specifically for it. Although intended for testers, the driver made its way onto the NVIDIA website. According to the change-log posted by them, the GeForce 310.64 beta enhances performance on Far Cry 3 by as much as 38 percent, in addition to all the performance enhancements and bug fixes being trickled down by previous R310 series drivers.

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 310.64 Beta

Samsung Electronics America, Inc., a market leader and award-winning innovator in consumer electronics, announced today that for a limited time over this Black Friday weekend, its new 250 gigabyte (GB) SSD 840 solid-state drives will be available at a special discounted price and will include a download of the new "Far Cry 3" video game from Ubisoft Entertainment at no additional cost.

From Black Friday through Cyber Monday (11/22 - 11/26), or while supplies last, consumers will be able to purchase the 250 GB version of Samsung's SSD 840 drive for just $169.99, $20 less than the usual minimum advertised price. They also will receive a code enabling them to download the full PC version of "Far Cry 3," normally priced at $59.99.

Club 3D offers a wide range of graphic cards. But which one will you choose ? Perhaps the games which you will get when purchasing your graphic card will help you decide. This page summarizes the games that are available with Club 3D's graphic card line. The page is divided into three sections. The first section,"The games", will lead you through the available games, and will point to the graphic cards that have this game included in the bundle. The second section, "the graphic cards and the bundles", starts with the graphic cards and will point out which game or even multiple games that are included, and the third section identifies the software that is included with which graphic cards.

For all of you PC gamers who didn't play the Uncharted series, and are starved of the visually-intense tropical-island setting that Dead Island miserably failed in, Far Cry 3 promises to be a bomb! Ubisoft released the latest "Stranded" trailer on the 15th, with a fuller trailer slated for later today, that shows incredibly detailed visuals, that are a throw-back to the original Crytek-made Far Cry. The trailer follows a possible protagonist touring a tropical island with his explorer friends, most of it is shown in found-footage style, leading up to one of the explorers' encounter with the game's antagonist. The trailer also gives out the release-date, September 4, 2012.The trailer video can be watched here.

Caution: The trailer contains strong-language, violence, and dubstep.