AMD's latest gaming hardware bundle is a standard practice for hardware marketing. In this case, however, Monster Hunter Wilds is a high-profile game that many might be looking to purchase already. If they're already planning to ugprade their PC, it's a nice bonus. Except, quite a few of the potential bundle items aren't really available anymore.
AMD has had many gaming bundles, and they're typically used to push specific CPUs, GPUs, laptops. Team Red will be bundling Monster Hunter Wilds with a number of its mid-range to high-end gaming CPUs, GPUs, and laptops for about the next two months. AMD sent out a press release containing a list of all the eligible products to outlets this morning, as well as publishing a web page highlighting the bundle and specifying the qualifying purchases, which we've organized into a table below for your convenience.
Like so many past bundles, at the time of writing, actually utilizing this deal does feel a little questionable. The best gaming CPUs right now are AMD's Ryzen X3D parts — none of which are part of the qualifying bundle list. And the AMD GPUs? As if! The 'best' option is $499 $531 on Amazon for an RX 7700 XT, which was selling for as little as $399 last year. So AMD is pushing CPUs that aren't as highly regarded, along with GPUs that you can't or at least shouldn't buy at current prices... plus laptops. One out of three isn't too bad, right?
The pricing of AMD's GPUs has shot up in the past couple of months, mostly due to the late arrival of the intended replacements. Nvidia's Blackwell RTX 50-series probably should have come out last October or November, right around the time supplies of the 4090 and 4080 Super disappeared, but there were delays precipitated by the data center B200 packaging problems. AMD was rumored to launch the RX 9000-series in January, but then backed off to apparently a March launch, and the various RDNA3 RX 7000-series GPUs are mostly out of stock or severely overpriced as well. The RX 7800 XT starts at $642, about $200 more than we saw during the holiday shopping season, while the various RX 7900 models mostly cost upward of $1,000 now.
For this reason, we anticipate that this bundle will actually be most appealing to those buying an AMD laptop or an AMD CPU, but if you're looking to buy Monster Hunter Wilds and can find a better price on a Radeon 7000-series GPU (and remember, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are supposed to arrive next month), maybe it's worth buying.
Monster Hunter Wilds has already caught a lot of flak for having high performance demands across PC and consoles alike, with consoles especially struggling to achieve a stable 30-60 FPS under its weight. The previous Monster Hunter World was also intensive, but Wilds has definitely taken it a step further, with the baseline "Recommended" specifications (Ryzen 5 3600X paired with an RX 6700 XT) requireing the use of Frame Generation to achieve 60 FPS.
That doesn't bode particularly well for iGPU-bound laptops that will be getting this game bundled, so we highly recommend running the free Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark available on the Steam page before installing the game on those systems to calibrate your expectations properly.
