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%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
458 Comments
View All Comments
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