We normally don’t cover contests and giveaways, but this one is just a bit different than the others and sheds some light on the inner workings of AMD, so we’ll take a quick look at it.

AMD is announcing today that they’re starting up a rewards program for users of their Gaming Evolved Application. The rewards program, dubbed AMD Rewards (not to be confused with Radeon Rewards) is a point based system that will see AMD rewarding users for using the Gaming Evolved application. The points in turn will be redeemable for a number of items, including games and some 3rd party hardware items, but most notably Sapphire Radeon R9 cards. All told, AMD is apparently putting up $5 million USD in merchandise, which would be a significant expense for a single promotion.

What makes this notable is the actions that will earn points in the program. AMD’s press release doesn’t have a complete list, but using the GEA game optimization service and playing supported games are specifically mentioned as activities that earn points. As we covered back in November when the GEA launched, the ad-hoc nature of data collection being used by Raptr and AMD meant that the service started with a very limited data set for optimization recommendations, due to a lack of data to bootstrap the service. Without a dedicated group to provide at least the initial data, the service would be slow to ramp up as AMD needs users playing games and running the GEA first, and only then would they be able to generate recommendations.

This latest promotion looks to be an effort at finally solving the data problem by providing an additional incentive for Radeon owners to use the GEA. If AMD can get enough data collected to make the service widely useful, then it would be able to achieve the critical mass of users needed to make the GEA game optimization service self-sustaining. We'll have to continue to keep an eye on the service and see what this does for AMD's data set. The idea behind the optimization service is very cool, so hopefully this promotion can give AMD the additional data the service needs to really shine.