Holidays are the perfect occasion to spend time with friends, family and have fun playing games! Just in time for the festive season, Ubisoft is giving two digital PC games away for FREE as part of its Happy Playdays! Players will have the opportunity to polish their strategy with World in Conflict and experience the Golden Age of Pirates with Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag. In addition to celebrate the festive season, Ubisoft is marking the 10th anniversary of both World in Conflict's launch and the creation of the Assassin's Creed's universe.

Ubisoft Massive released World in Conflict in September 2007, an innovative RTS game in a Cold War setting. A single-player expansion called Soviet Assault followed in 2009. The game features both a strong and captivating single-player campaign and an intense multiplayer section that supports up to 16 players. With many other features, including Voice Over IP, amazing graphics and completely destructible battlefields, World in Conflict is an intense strategy experience unlike anything you've ever seen before. Released to high critical acclaim, it has been called one of the best strategy games ever made.

AMD announced the availability of ATI Catalyst version 9.6 driver suite, that provides driver support for ATI Radeon series graphics processors (driver version 8.62), Hydravision, AMD Southbridge/Chipset driver, and Catalyst Control Center (version 8.62). The new version brings along the following application-specific performance increments:

• Company of Heores - performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series.
• Crysis Warhead - performance gains of up to 11% for ATI CrossFireX configurations.
• Crysis - performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX configurations.
• World in Conflict - performance gains of up to 30% for settings are were previously CPU limited.

The Linux version of this driver suite adds production support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and SLED 11. It also provides early support for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.8.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.6 for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows 7/Vista 64-bit

Release Notes can be read here

Today, Intel made its newest piece of silicon, the Core i7 series processor official with the introduction of three models based on the newer architecture, and socket. One of the significant feature-additions for Core i7 is the 192-bit wide DDR3 memory bus, meaning that memory modules in groups of three or six can be used to make use of the triple-channel memory controller the processors come with.

For memory vendors, it means selling kits consisting of three or six modules of 1 GB or 2 GB per module, resulting in 3 GB, 6 GB or potentially, a 12 GB kit (consisting of six 2 GB modules). Corsair, on its part, has been advertising the benefits of 4 GB system memory in the recent past, in a bit to sell its 2x 2GB kits. One of the important benefits Corsair noted was, that it benefited today's games. Come Core i7, and Corsair thinks 6 GB of memory would significantly benefit gaming PCs based on the Core i7 processors. The company released a whitepaper, in which gaming performance between Core i7-based systems equipped with 3 GB and 6 GB of memory were compared.

Although the PC version retailed nearly two weeks ago, Sierra Entertainment confirmed today that the Xbox 360 edition of World in Conflict, the award-winning action-strategy game developed by Massive Entertainment, will now ship in 2008. The game's original ship date was targeted for Fall 2007. More information is expected to be released in the coming months.

World in Conflict is an RTS game that is set in 1988, where economic troubles, similar to the ones that occurred in real-life, cripple the Soviet Union to the extent where it must risk nuclear Armageddon to stay in power.
Massive Entertainment, Sierra and Intel invite you to join the open beta and find out what you are made of. Registration begins on 1 July and will be open until the end of the open beta phase. The open beta will begin on 11 July and will last until 31 July.

Signup here.