The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Unlike Battlefield 4 where we needed to switch back to DirectX for performance reasons on the R9 Fury X, AMD’s latest card still holds up rather well on Mantle here, probably due to the fact that Civilization is a newer game. Though not drawn in this chart, what we find is that AMD loses a frame or two per second for running Mantle, but in return they see far, far better minimums (more on that later).
Overall then the R9 Fury X looks pretty good at 4K. Even at Ultra quality it can deliver a better than 60fps average and is within 2% of the GTX 980 Ti. On the other hand AMD struggles a bit more at 1440p, where the absolute framerate is still rather high, but relative to the GTX 980 Ti it’s now an 11% performance gap. This being a Mantle game, the fact that AMD does fall behind is a bit surprising, as at a high level they should be enjoying the CPU benefits of the low-level API. We’ll revisit 1440p performance a bit later on, but this is going to be a recurring quirk for AMD, and a detriment for 1440p 144Hz monitor owners.
The bigger advantage of Mantle is really the minimum framerates, and here the R9 Fury X soars. At 4K the R9 Fury X delivers a minimum framerate of 50.5fps, some 20% better than the GTX 980 Ti. Both cards do well enough here, but it goes without saying that this is a very distinct difference, and one that is well in AMD’s favor. The only downside for AMD here is that they can’t keep this advantage at 1440p, where they go back to trailing the GTX 980 Ti in minimum framerates by 7%.
On that note I do have one concern here with AMD’s support plans for Mantle. Mainly I’m worried that as well as the R9 Fury X does here, there’s a risk Mantle may stop working in the future. The GCN 1.2 based R9 285 can’t use the Mantle path at all (it crashes), and the R9 Fury X is not all that different in architecture.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
458 Comments
View All Comments
chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
@piiman - I guess we'll see soon enough, I'm confident it won't make any difference given GPU prices have gone up and up anyways. If anything we may see price stabilization as we've seen in the CPU industry.medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Another portion of bulshit from nVidia troll.AMD never ever had more than 25% of CPU share. Doom to Intel, my ass.
Even in Prescott times Intell was selling more CPUs and for higher price.
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
@medi03 AMD was up to 30% a few times and they did certainly have performance leadership at the time of K8 but of course they wanted to charge anyone for the privilege. Higher price? No, $450 for entry level Athlon 64, much more than what they charged in the past and certainly much more than Intel was charging at the time going up to $1500 on the high end with their FX chips.Samus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Best interest? Broken up for scraps? You do realize how important AMD is to people who are Intel\NVidia fans right?Without AMD, Intel and NVidia are unchallenged, and we'll be back to paying $250 for a low-end video card and $300 for a mid-range CPU. There would be no GTX 750's or Pentium G3258's in the <$100 tier.
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
@Samus, they're irrelevant in the CPU market and have been for years, and yet amazingly, prices are as low as ever since Intel began dominating AMD in performance when they launched Core 2. Since then I've upgraded 5x and have not paid more than $300 for a high-end Intel CPU. How does this happen without competition from AMD as you claim? Oh right, because Intel is still competing with itself and needs to provide enough improvement in order to entice me to buy another one of their products and "upgrade".The exact same thing will happen in the GPU sector, with or without AMD. Not worried at all, in fact I'm looking forward to the day a company with deep pockets buys out AMD and reinvigorates their products, I may actually have a reason to buy AMD (or whatever it is called after being bought out) again!
Iketh - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
you overestimate the human drive... if another isn't pushing us, we will get lazy and that's not an argument... what we'll do instead to make people upgrade is release products in steps planned out much further into the future that are even smaller steps than how intel is releasing nowsilverblue - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
I think this chart shows a better view of who was the underdog and when:http://i59.tinypic.com/5uk3e9.jpg
ATi were ahead for the 9xxx series, and that's it. Moreover, NVIDIA's chipset struggles with Intel were in 2009 and settled in early 2011, something that would've benefitted NVIDIA far more than Intel's settlement with AMD as it would've done far less damage to NVIDIA's financials over a much shorter period of time.
The lack of higher end APUs hasn't helped, nor has the issue with actually trying to get a GPU onto a CPU die in the first place. Remember that when Intel tried it with Clarkdale/Arrandale, the graphics and IMC were 45nm, sitting alongside everything else which was 32nm.
chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
I think you have to look at a bigger sample than that, riding on the 9000 series momentum, AMD was competitive for years with a near 50/50 share through the X800/X1900 series. And then G80/R600 happened and they never really recovered. There was a minor blip with Cypress vs. Fermi where AMD got close again but Nvidia quickly righted things with GF106 and GF110 (GTX 570/580).Scali - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
nVidia wasn't the underdog in terms of technology. nVidia was the choice of gamers. ATi was big because they had been around since the early days of CGA and Hercules, and had lots of OEM contracts.In terms of technology and performance, ATi was always struggling to keep up with nVidia, and they didn't reach parity until the Radeon 8500/9700-era, even though nVidia was the newcomer and ATi had been active in the PC market since the mid-80s.
Frenetic Pony - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Well done analysis, though the kick in the head was Bulldozer and it's utter failure. Core 2 wasn't really AMD's downfall so much as Core/Sandy Bridge, which came at the exact wrong time for the utter failure of Bulldozer. This combined with AMD's dismal failure to market its graphics card has cost them billions. Even this article calls the 290x problematic, a card that offered the same performance as the original Titan at a fraction of the price. Based on empirical data the 290/x should have been almost continuously sold until the introduction of Nvidia's Maxwell architecture.Instead people continued to buy the much less performant per dollar Nvidia cards and/or waited for "the good GPU company" to put out their new architecture. AMD's performance in marketing has been utterly appalling at the same time Nvidia's has been extremely tight. Whether that will, or even can, change next year remains to be seen.