The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTDragon Age: Inquisition
Our RPG of choice for 2015 is Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest game in the Dragon Age series of ARPGs. Offering an expansive world that can easily challenge even the best of our video cards, Dragon Age also offers us an alternative take on EA/DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, which powers this game along with Battlefield 4.
Similar to Battlefield 4, we have swapped out Mantle for DirectX here; the R9 Fury X didn’t suffer too much from Mantle, but it certainly was not in the card’s favor.
Perhaps it’s a Frostbite thing or maybe AMD just got unlucky here, but Dragon Age is the second-worst showing for the R9 Fury X. The card trails the GTX 980 Ti at all times, by anywhere between 13% and 18%. At this point AMD is straddling the line between the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti, and at 1440p they fall closer to the GTX 980.
Meanwhile I feel this is another good example of why single-GPU cards aren’t quite ready yet for no-compromises 4K gaming. Even without MSAA the R9 Fury X can’t break out of the 30s, we have to drop to High quality to do that. On the other hand going to 1440p immediately gets Ultra quality performance over 60fps.
Finally, the R9 Fury X’s performance gains over its predecessor are also among their lowest here. The Fiji based card picks up just 22% at 4K, and less at 1440p. Once again we are likely looking at a bottleneck closer to geometry or ROP performance, which leaves the shaders underutilized.
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mikato - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Wow very interesting, thanks bugsy. I hope those guys at the various forums can work out the details and maybe a reputable tech reviewer will take a look.OrphanageExplosion - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
I'm still a bit perplexed about how AMD gets an absolute roasting for CrossFire frame-pacing - which only impacted a tiny amount of users - while the sub-optimal DirectX 11 driver (which will affect everyone to varying extents in CPU-bound scenarios) doesn't get anything like the same level of attention.I mean, AMD commands a niche when it comes to the value end of the market, but if you're combining a budget CPU with one of their value GPUs, chances are that in many games you're not going to see the same kind of performance you see from benchmarks carried out on mammoth i7 systems.
And here, we've reached a situation where not even the i7 benchmarking scenario can hide the impact of the driver on a $650 part, hence the poor 1440p performance (which is even worse at 1080p). Why invest all that R&D, time, effort and money into this mammoth piece of hardware and not improve the driver so we can actually see what it's capable of? Is AMD just sitting it out until DX12?
harrydr - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
With the black screen problem of r9 graphic cards not easy to support amd.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Because lying to customers about VRAM performance, ROP count, and cache size is a far better way to conduct business.Oh, and the 970's specs are still false on Nvidia's website (claims 224 GB/s but that is impossible because of the 28 GB/s partition and the XOR contention — the more the slow partition is used the closer the other partition can get to the theoretical speed of 224 but the more it's used the more the faster partition is slowed by the 28 GB/s sloth — so a catch-22).
It's pretty amazing that Anandtech came out with a "Correcting the Specs" article but Nvidia is still claiming false numbers on their website.
Peichen - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
And yet 970 is still faster. Nvidia is more efficient with resources than they let people on.Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
The XOR contention and 28 GB/s sure is efficiency. If only the 8800 GT could have had VRAM that slow back in 2007.Gunbuster - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Came for the chizow, was not disappointed.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
:)madwolfa - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
"Throw a couple of these into a Micro-ATX SFF PC, and it will be the PSU, not the video cards, that become your biggest concern".I think the biggest concern here would be to fit a couple of 120mm radiators.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
My current Micro-ATX case has room for dual 120mm rads and a 240mm rad. plenty of room there