The big picture: Nvidia and AMD bundle free games with GPU and CPU purchases just about every year, but the GPUs participating in this year's offer have already seen their prices plummet. The promotion is Nvidia's latest attempt to clear stock before launching the RTX 4000 series.
On Wednesday, Nvidia announced that it's offering free Steam copies of Spider-Man Remastered with purchases of an RTX 3080, 3080Ti, 3090, or 3090 Ti from now until October 12. The deal applies to individual GPUs as well as desktops and laptops containing the higher-end Ampere cards from participating retailers. Users must redeem game codes through Nvidia's GeForce Experience desktop app.
Tech analyses show Spider-Man isn't a particularly demanding title by modern standards since it initially launched for the PlayStation 4. The high-end cards Nvidia is bundling with the title can run the game at 60 frames per second in 4K, even with ray tracing enabled. Nvidia's DLSS image upscaling should push those framerates even higher.
Spider-Man Remastered, released on August 12, is the latest PC port of a former PlayStation exclusive from Sony. Compared to the PlayStation 5 version, the game on PC features improvements in ray tracing, texture filtering, LoD quality, SSAO, and shadows.
When the 3080 and 3090 initially launched in 2020, pandemic supply chain disruptions and crypto mining inflated their prices and made them hard to acquire. Entering fall 2022 --- just as Nvidia prepares to launch the RTX 4090 and possibly the 4080 --- the situation is reversed.
The crypto crash earlier this year sunk prices, and Nvidia plans to lower them further to clear its backlog of unsold GPUs. The 3080 Ti and both 3090 models currently go for double-digit percentages below MSRP. With many customers waiting on RTX 4000, Nvidia hopes a free copy of Spider-Man can convince some to pull the trigger on a 3000 series card now. More popular mid-range 3000 models like the 3060 haven't seen the same price pressure.
Intel will also soon offer a bundle with its graphics cards and CPUs to sweeten its entry into the dedicated GPU arena with the Arc Alchemist series. Through the end of 2022, customers who buy an A500 or A700 series card together with a non-i3 Alder Lake processor can receive Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, Gotham Knights, DLC for Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt, PowerDirector 365, D5 Render, MAGIX Video Pro, Topaz Gigapixel AI, or XSplit Premium Suite for free.