Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of AMD’s belief that there will be no Direct X 12, fancy Google Street View videos, and how the next Xbox could take control of your TV.

Good news for PC gamers looking to upgrade for Battlefield 4: the next generation of AMD releases will come bundled with the game itself.

The source for the claim is XBit Labs, who quote Roy Taylor, corporate vice president of global channel sales for AMD in an interview with Heise.de, a German tech site.

“[Partnership between AMD and EA DICE on the Battlefield 4] was presented at the Game Developer Conference,” said Taylor, “and the AMD Gaming Evolved logo already appeared online in the context of the game.”

“You can expect that Battlefield 4 will be part of [future] Never Settle bundles.”

The footage of Battlefield 4 we saw at GDC was running on a PC “based on the 7990 graphics card”, which has not yet been released to the public. You can see that footage in 1080p and 60FPS on our file library (quota-free, naturally).

Source: Xbit via Evil Avatar

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of AMD’s response to Nvidia’s “bitter” PS4 put-downs, possible Internet sabotage attempts, the lifting of electronics use during take-off and landing, and yet another amazing discovery that could change the way we make and use electronics.

Thanks to the small fact that over five hundred of you entered our massive Crysis 3/ASUS AMD giveaway, we ended up completely missing our deadline to have all the winners sorted and announced. Please accept my apologies; I am only human and my bones are so weak. Now, though, the sorting has been finished — and we are ready to hand out the prizes. Let’s begin.

Have you seen our massive Crysis 3 and ASUS AMD card giveway? Probably, it’s on the background of the site right now. I’d be worried if you missed it!

But have you entered? If you haven’t, you have until midnight tonight (Adelaide time) to do so.

With over 460 entries, this is one of our biggest competitions ever — and with some great prizes to give away including an ASUS AMD RADEON HD 7970, that’s no surprise!

Get on over there now. Go on! Get.

Yesterday’s tease from AMD promised a revolution in PC gaming realism, and AMD have delivered… a new hair-rendering system. Sounds weird? It actually looks super impressive, and AMD are debuting it in the PC version of Tomb Raider. Don’t worry though, it’ll work on NVIDIA cards as well — all DX11 cards will be supported.

“TressFX Hair revolutionizes Lara Croft’s locks by using the DirectCompute programming language to unlock the massively-parallel processing capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture, enabling image quality previously restricted to pre-rendered images,” reads AMD’s announcement. “Building on AMD’s previous work on Order Independent Transparency (OIT), this method makes use of Per-Pixel Linked-List (PPLL) data structures to manage rendering complexity and memory usage.”

Check out the before-and-after pictures below for some promising comparisons (click for larger).

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AMD have released an image on their blog for something they’re calling ‘a new frontier of realism in PC gaming’. Going by the name ‘TRESSFX’, the image shows a whole pile of admittedly-nicely rendered hair and, well.. not much else.

A ‘tress’ is of course a lock of hair, so that would make sense, and… are AMD just unveiling a whole new way of rendering hair? This seems like an odd use of company time, but if it can look impressive enough, I’ll sure be interested.

More info is slated for the 26th, so probably some time on Wednesday morning for us here in Australia.

Source: AMD via VG247

With thanks to the good folks at ASUS and EA, we’ve got 10 copies of Crysis 3: Hunter Edition on PC and three shiny new ASUS RADEON HD cards to give away! Oh, and a bunch of sweet Crysis 3 t-shirts, too. How can you win this amazing prize? Read on!

AMD have announced that their ‘Never Settle: Reloaded’ bundles will soon be bundled with major releases from this year’s gaming calendar, including codes for Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider.

Purchasers of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 series will receive codes for Crysis 3 and BioShock Infinite, while 7800 series purchases will get free copies of BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider. If you’re a big spender and you can splash out for dual 7900 series cards, you’ll get all of the above, as well as Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: Absolution and Far Cry 3.

AMD confirmed with us today that these new offers would be available immediately in Australia and New Zealand, but it may take a while for stock to get through. Check with your local!

Not to be outdone by NVIDIA’s offering, rivals AMD have announced the release of their own beta drivers, improving performance for Crysis 3 players.

The new 13.2 beta drivers offer 15% improvements to MSAA in Crysis 3, as well as significant improvements in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, DmC Devil May Cry and Crysis 2. It also resolves texture-flickering in some DirectX 9.0c applications.

You can download the drivers right here from our file library. Enjoy!

The latest AMD drivers are now available to download from the games.on.net file library, and they’re promising some staggering performance increases. 7870 users stand to gain some of the biggest boosts, with nearly 20% increased performance in Battlefield 3.

Hardware Canucks have done a great roundup of the performance boosts that AMD users can stand to gain across a wide variety of games. If you’re an AMD user, these new ‘Never Settle’ drivers are well worth your time.