In Nigel’s latest blog, he gives the big picture of what the new AMD Fusion campaign means to our customers and business partners. Being the new tech lover that I am, I decided to explore the new AMD Fusion for Gaming utility. I‘ll start broad, then get to the juicy details, but first a teaser from my personal numbers: I saw a best-case gaming experience frames-per-second improvement of over 100% using the new utility.

First, as I have covered in previous blogs here and here, for PCs, AMD innovates around usage models. Whether it’s productivity, home media, or playing games, we work with customers, channels, and end users to better understand their pain and pleasure points, apply the right integrated technologies to meet those needs, and then help deliver the complete experience through our customers and channels.

Console and PC Gaming are very important usage models to AMD, and we apply many hardware and software innovations for both "hard-core gamers" and "consumers who like to play games." Hardware innovations include our ATI Radeon HD graphics, AMD Phenom and AMD Turion processors, and the chipset platforms. On the software side, we deliver drivers and the award-winning ATI Catalyst Control Center that lets you tweak almost every aspect of your graphics card with respect to 3D, video, color, power management, multi-GPUs, and display connectivity. Also, AMD Overdrive allows you to tune the performance of your CPU, memory, and chipset.

When the AMD Fusion for Gaming development team asked me to try out their newest software creation last weekend, I jumped ALL over it and wanted to share my experiences.

Hard core gamers know that to have the best experience possible, they need a bad-ass graphics card like the ATI Radeon HD 4870, a beefy CPU like the Phenom 9850 processor, a great performance chipset like the AMD 790GX, software tools like AMD Overdrive and ATI Overdrive, and as few applications and tasks as possible running in the foreground and background. Historically, even for knowledgeable enthusiasts, this would be a time-consuming process. For the mainstream user who likes to play games, this type of performance optimization was completely out of reach. To solve these pain points, we created the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility.

The AMD Fusion for Gaming utility was designed to optimize your AMD-based PC for smoother, more responsive game play in the latest PC games with the touch of a button; the utility helps achieve the performance previously only available to highly technical enthusiasts. It works by temporarily shutting down background processes and intensifying processor performance with AMD Boost. That means you can keep all the features, tasks, and applications running on your Microsoft Windows Vista PC ready when you need them, but turn them off when you are ready to get down to serious gaming.

"Simplicity" was the design principle for the utility, but we still let you peek behind the curtains into the advanced interface to change how the utility works. You can customize with user selectable profiles to individually optimize your PC for gaming. Also, you can easily build your own profile and choose exactly what you want disabled for a leaner footprint. If you want to squeeze every bit of performance from your system, engage our most advanced acceleration technologies such as AMD Overdrive, Auto-Tuning and Hard Drive Acceleration.