Nvidia tosses a free copy of Metal Gear Solid V in with GeForce graphics cards

23.07.2015
It's official: Nvidia confirmed today that most of its 900-series graphics cards will now be bundled with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain after the deal started showing up on Newegg earlier this week. And I find that sentence pretty amazing, considering Metal Gear Solid took a decade-long hiatus from even showing up on the PC.

From Nvidia's blog post:

"Like Ground Zeroes, The Phantom Pain will benefit greatly from the performance and features of GeForce GTX GPUs, which enable more detailed graphics, higher-quality effects, extended view distances, significantly higher rendering resolutions, Nvidia Dynamic Super Resolution support, Nvidia SHIELD GameStream support, Nvidia ShadowPlay gameplay capture, Nvidia SLI support, and one-click optimal playable settings courtesy of GeForce Experience."

Of course, take all that with a Mt. Everest-sized grain of salt--lest we forget, The Phantom Pain is taking over for the previously-bundled game Batman: Arkham Knight which barely worked at all on the PC. And the commenters on Nvidia's blog post certainly haven't forgotten, with three out of the four comments (at time of writing) referencing Batman's disastrous launch.

With rumors circling that Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has been forced out of Konami and that his name's been stripped off The Phantom Pain, it's entirely possible Nvidia's exchanged one controversial bundle for another here.

Regardless, it's hard to complain too much about free games. And Nvidia still has the most promising bundles--it got burned with Batman because it's consistently giving away games that aren't even out yet. Contrast that with AMD's bundles, which have fallen off in quality recently (when they're offered at all).

The deal is good on the GTX 980 Ti, 980, 970, and 960 cards, plus "select GeForce GTX 980M and 970M notebooks." If you're interested, make sure you purchase the game through one of Nvidia's designated retailers, which you can find here.

(www.pcworld.com)

Hayden Dingman