The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTThe Talos Principle
Croteam’s first person puzzle and exploration game The Talos Principle may not involve much action, but the game’s lush environments still put even fast video cards to good use. Coupled with the use of 4x MSAA at Ultra quality, and even a tranquil puzzle game like Talos can make a good case for more powerful video cards.
Coming off of AMD’s poor Dragon Age performance, The Talos Principle offers the R9 Fury X a much-needed win. At 4K with Ultra quality settings the card is able to hit 57.2fps, just shy of 60fps. More importantly it’s ahead of not only the GTX 980 Ti, but the GTX Titan X as well, taking down both of NVIDIA’s flagships at once. The 9% lead over the GTX 980 Ti is one of the best AMD will see all day, so this is a game that’s clearly in AMD’s favor.
Do note however that AMD’s performance once again regresses at 1440p. It’s enough to retain the lead, if just barely, and tie the GTX Titan X. Thankfully for AMD this is an example of a game where a single GPU card is plenty for 4K gaming.
As for the R9 290X comparison, the results end up being very interesting. The R9 Fury X sees some very impressive gains here, improving over the R9 290X by 47% at 1440p and an amazing 60% at 4K. Given that the latter is outright outside our theoretical performance window for a shader-bound scenario, I suspect there’s more at play here than just GPU improvements. And sure enough, running the modified Catalyst 15.15 drivers on the R9 290X finds that performance improves by 21% at 4K, to 43.6fps, so it looks like AMD has been doing some optimizing for this game.
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...