Spider-Man Remastered available for free on RTX 3080 and 3090 until October 12

Big Picture: Nvidia and AMD bundle free games with GPU and CPU purchases almost every year, but the prices of the GPUs included in this year’s offer have already plummeted. The promotion is Nvidia’s latest attempt to clear stock ahead of the launch of the RTX 4000 series.

Wednesday Nvidia announced that it is offering free Steam copies of Spider-Man Remastered with the purchase of an RTX 3080, 3080Ti, 3090, or 3090 Ti from now until October 12th. The deal covers select GPUs as well as desktops and laptops containing higher-end Ampere cards. from participating retailers. Users must redeem game codes through the Nvidia GeForce Experience desktop app.

Technical analysis shows that Spider-Man is not a particularly demanding game by today’s standards, as it was originally released for the PlayStation 4. The high-end Nvidia cards that came with the game can run the game at 60fps in 4K, even with ray tracing. Nvidia’s DLSS image scaling should boost that frame rate even further.

Spider-Man Remastered, released on August 12, is the latest PC port of Sony’s former PlayStation exclusive. Compared to the PlayStation 5 version, the PC game has improved ray tracing, texture filtering, LoD quality, SSAO, and shadows.

When the 3080 and 3090 were first released in 2020, supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic and cryptocurrency mining pushed up their prices and made them difficult to acquire. In the fall of 2022 – just as Nvidia is gearing up to launch the RTX 4090 and possibly the 4080 – the situation is reversed.

The crypto crash earlier this year has driven prices down, and Nvidia plans to cut them even further to get rid of unsold GPUs. The 3080 Ti and both 3090 models are currently double-digit percentages below the suggested retail price. With many customers waiting for the RTX 4000, Nvidia is hoping a free copy of Spider-Man can convince some to pull the trigger on a 3000-series card right now. The more popular mid-range 3000s, such as the 3060, didn’t face this price pressure.

Intel will also soon offer a bundle with its graphics cards and processors to sweeten its entry into the dedicated GPU arena with the Arc Alchemist series. Until the end of 2022, customers who purchase an A500 or A700 series card along with a non-i3 Alder Lake processor will be able to receive Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, Gotham Knights, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt DLC, PowerDirector 365 , D5 Render, MAGIX Video Pro, Topaz Gigapixel AI or XSplit Premium Suite for free.