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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
458 Comments
View All Comments
OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - link
Anti-aliasing is required for the same reason that no AA still sticks out on 3D titles on an iPad, but in my experience with a 32-inch 4K Asus, post-process AA (SMAA, FXAA) does the job just fine.Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
"the OS uses 3 GB to 3.5 GB"That's insane bloat.
Nerdsinc - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
I sincerely hope the Overclocking limitations are related to software, a $1000 card with liquid cooling ought to be able to pull higher clocks than that...yhselp - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Out of curiosity, is it really possible for an Xbox One/PlayStation 4 game to take up over 4GB of memory just for graphics, since just 5GB total are usable for games?Refuge - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
When ported to PC yes. That is because we usualyl get enhanced graphics settings that they do not.PC ports are also less efficient because of low budget ports. Which just compounds the issue more.
Computers have to be more powerful than their console counter parts in order to play equivalent games due to sloppy coding, and enhanced visual options.
ludikraut - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Lack of HDMI 2.0 support totally kills the card for me. Who the heck wants to look at 4K at 30Hz? Guess I'll be sticking with my GTX 970 for a while.l8r)
eodeot - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
You didn't even mention AMDs poor power consumption while idle with multiple monitors or while playing back a video of any kind.For some reason AMD thinks that playing back 240p Youtube video requires 3d clocks and thus 3d power consumption, even if the video is paused.
AMD failed to address it for the past 5 years and you failed to mention it yet again. Nvidia fixed this long ago...
JJofLegend - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link
I recently got an AMD Fury X, but I'm running into an issue with my games. I've tried with Battlefield 4, Crisis 3, Quantum Break, ReCore, The Division, and they all have the same distortion. Any ideas or anyone that can make suggestions? I don't know how to trouble shoot this.Here is a screenshot of Crisis 3:
https://vjkc5g-ch3301.files.1drv.com/y3m_mcTTTddOj...