The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTFar Cry 4
The next game in our 2015 GPU benchmark suite is Far Cry 4, Ubisoft’s Himalayan action game. A lot like Crysis 3, Far Cry 4 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with Ultra settings thanks to the game’s expansive environments.
Like the Talos Principle, this is another game that treats AMD well. The R9 Fury X doesn’t just beat the GTX 980 Ti at 4K Ultra, but it beats the GTX Titan X as well. Even 1440p Ultra isn’t too shabby, with a smaller gap but none the less the same outcome.
Overall what we find is that the R9 Fury X has a 9% lead at 4K Ultra, and a 4% lead at 1440p Ultra, making this one of the only games where AMD takes the lead at 1440p. However something interesting happens if we run at 4K with lower quality settings, and that lead evaporates very quickly, shifting to an NVIDIA lead by roughly the same amount. At this time I don’t have a good explanation for this other than to say that whatever is going on at Ultra, it clearly is very different from what happens at Medium quality, and it favors AMD.
Finally, the performance gains over the R9 290X are around average. At 4K and 1440p Ultra the R9 Fury X picks up 35%; at 4K Medium that shrinks to 30%.
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chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
What about geometry Ryan? ROPs are often used interchangeably with Geometry/Set-up engine, there is definitely something going on with Fury X at lower resolutions, in instances where SP performance is no problem, it just can't draw/fill pixels fast enough and performs VERY similarly to previous gen or weaker cards (290X/390X and 980). TechReport actually has quite a few theoreticals that show this, where their pixel fill is way behind GM200 and much closer to Hawaii/GM204.extide - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Yeah my bet is on Geometry. Check out the Synthetics page. It own the Pixel and Texel fillrate tests, but loses on the Tessellation test which has a large dependency on geometry. nVidia has also been historically very strong with geometry.CajunArson - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review! While the conclusions aren't really any different than all the other reputable review sites on the Interwebs, you were very thorough and brought an interesting perspective to the table too. Better late than never!NikosD - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
You must use the latest nightly build of LAV filters, in order to be able to use the 4K H.264 DXVA decoder of AMD cards.All previous builds fall back to SW mode.
tynopik - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"today’s launch of the Fiji GPU"andychow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Best review ever. Worth the wait. Get sick more often!tynopik - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
pg 2 - compression taking palcelimitedaccess - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Ryan, regarding Mantle performance back in the R9 285 review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-2... you wrote that AMD stated the issue with performance regression was that developers had not yet optimized for Tonga's newer architecture. While here you state that the performance regression is due to AMD having not optimized on the driver side. What is the actual case? What is the actual weighting given these three categories? -Hardware Driver
API
Software/Game
What I'm wondering is if we make an assumption that upcoming low level APIs will have similar behavior as Mantle what will happen going forward as more GPU architectures are introduced and newer games are introduced? If the onus shifts especially heavily towards the software side it it seems more realistic in practice that developers will have much more narrower scope in which optimize for.
I'm wondering if Anandtech could possibly look more indept into this issue as to how it pertains to the move towards low level APIs used in the future as it could have large implications in terms of the software/hardware support relationship going forward.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"What is the actual case? What is the actual weighting given these three categories? -"Right now the ball appears to be solidly in AMD's court. They are taking responsibility for the poor performance of certain Mantle titles on R9 Fury X.
As it stands I hesitate to read into this too much for DX12/Vulkan. Those are going to be finalized, widely supported APIs, unlike Mantle which has gone from production to retirement in the span of just over a year.
limitedaccess - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the response. I guess we will see more for certain as time moves on.My concern is if lower level APIs require more architecture specific optimizations and the burden is shifted to developers in practice that will cause some rather "interesting" implications.
Also what would be of interest is how much of reviewers test suites will still look at DX11 performance as a possible fallback should this become a possible issue.