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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just4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
I thought it was great as well.. It had a lot more meat to it then I was expecting. Ryan might have been late to the party but he's getting more feedback than most other sites on his review so that shows that it was highly anticipated.B3an - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
I don't understand why the Fury X doesn't perform better... It's specs are considerably better than a 290X/390X and it's memory bandwidth is far higher than any other card out there... yet it still can't beat the 980 Ti and should also be faster than it already is compared to the 290X. It just doesn't make sense.just4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Early drivers and perhaps the change over into a new form of memory tech has a bit of a tech curve that isn't fully realized yet.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Perhaps DX11 is holding it back. As far as I understand it, Maxwell is more optimized for DX11 than AMD's cards are. AMD really should have sponsored a game engine or something so that there would have been a DX12 title available for benchmarkers with this card's launch.dominopourous - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great stuff. Can we get a benchmarks with these cards overclocked? I'm thinking the 980 Ti and the Titan X will scale much better with overclocking compared to Fury X.Mark_gb - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great review. With 1 exception.Once again, the 400 AMP number is tossed around as how much power the Fury X can handle. But think about that for one second. Even a EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 G2 Power Supply is extreme overkill for a system with a single Fury X in it, and its +12V rail only provides 133.3 amps.
That 400 AMP number is wrong. Very wrong. It should be 400 watts. Push 400 Amps into a Fury X and it most likely would literally explode. I would not want to be anywhere near that event.
AngelOfTheAbyss - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
The operating voltage of the Fury chip is probably around 1V, so 400A sounds correct (1V*400A = 400W).meacupla - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
okay, see, it's not 12V * 400A = 4800W. It's 1V (or around 1V) * 400A = 400W4800W would trip most 115VAC circuit breakers, as that would be 41A on 115VAC, before you even start accounting for conversion losses.
bugsy1339 - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Anyone hear about Nvidia lowering thier graphics quality to get a higher frame rate in reviews vs Fury? Reference is semi accurate forum 7/3 (Nvidia reduces IQ to boost performance on 980TI? )sa365 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
I too would like to know more re:bugsy1939 comment.Have Nvidia been caught out with lower IQ levels forced in the driver?