Valve Games for FREE!

This deal includes all ATI Radeon cards ever produced!

DOUG LOMBARDI from Valve has announced that this game developer/publisher has reached an agreement with AMD/ATI. The cooperation will result in owners of ATI Radeon cards getting some content unlocked.
To be more precise, Half Life 2: Lost Coast Tech Demo and Half Life 2: Multiplayer are unlocked and free for all the folk with ATI cards carrying "Radeon" moniker. Owners of ATi Radeon HD 2900XT will get that cancelled retail package named Black Box, containing Half Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

In order to ease the deal, starting from now, ATi Catalyst will come with a bundled installation of Steam. Since Steam is only some 0.6MB in size, it will not increase download by much. This Catalyst+Steam bundling deal will last until mid-2008, but offer for ATI owners will remain – a definite cool move by ATI and Valve folk.

That's cool, i bought a radeon card some time ago and got hl2 and css with it, and all the hl games.
I've been enjoying them every minute

Its just a shame that I already own these games(Half Life 2: Lost Coast Tech Demo and Half Life 2: Multiplayer). Bastards.

From the benchmarks I've seen, the "cancelled black box" is still not a real incentive for getting a 2900XT.

Originally posted by 64705@May 30 2007, 10:06 PM
From the benchmarks I've seen, the "cancelled black box" is still not a real incentive for getting a 2900XT.

Since this the love for ATI topic I'd like to add that the benchmarks currently available are based on drivers still not fully able to squeeze everything out of the new 2900 series. Lets not forget that the first benchmarks for the Nvidia 8800 were terrible too, especially on Vista and dx10 what they were intended for and most cards of both brands in the past had driver issues on release. Lets wait for some figures upon the 7.5 release before judging.

Yeah good point, but its not as if ATI haven't had months to prepare a suitable driver. Working hardware has been available for development purposes since Christmas 2006. Everyone slated NVIDIA at the time, but after all the fuss that was created back then, ironically, it is the same story for ATI.

Personally I cannot wait for Team Fortress 2, as it may the one game that convinces me to get back into FPS MP gaming. Portal looks gimmicky and Episode 2 is going to be another on-rails generic FPS designed around mid-range systems...

The whole issue is that the benchmarks of dx10 are all based on Lost planet and that game was heavily sponsored by Nvidia. Ati didn't even know anything about it till released and then the driver the benches are based on were already out. Corporate warfare, the real life battlefield

Originally posted by Gm2â„¢@May 31 2007, 04:18 PM
Personally I cannot wait for Team Fortress 2

Yeah it really looks promising. I watched the "meet the heavy" video last week, which demonstrates new facial animation technology being used, and that was quite interesting.
Found on STEAM and GH3D if anyone is interested.

Well if ati wants to show their true potential, they should be fast, because i'm going to take my new rig soon