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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bennyg - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Marketing performance. Exactly.Except efficiency was not good enough across the generations of 28nm GCN in an era where efficiency + thermal/power limits constrain performance, and look what Nvidia did over a similar era from Fermi (which was at market when GCN 1.0 was released) to Kepler to Maxwell. Plus efficiency is kind of the ultimate marketing buzzword in all areas of tech and not having any ability to mention it (plus having generally inferor products) hamstrung their marketing all along
xenol - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Efficiency is important because of three things:1. If your TDP is through the rough, you'll have issues with your cooling setup. Any time you introduce a bigger cooling setup because your cards run that hot, you're going to be mocked for it and people are going to be weary of it. With 22nm or 20nm nowhere in sight for GPUs, efficiency had to be a priority, otherwise you're going to ship cards that take up three slots or ship with water coolers.
2. You also can't just play to the desktop market. Laptops are still the preferred computing platform and even if people are going for a desktop, AIOs are looking much more appealing than a monitor/tower combo. So you want to have any shot in either market, you have to build an efficient chip. And you have to convince people they "need" this chip, because Intel's iGPUs do what most people want just fine anyway.
3. Businesses and such with "always on" computers would like it if their computers ate less power. Even if you can save a handful of watts, multiplying that by thousands and they add up to an appreciable amount of savings.
xenol - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
(Also by "computing platform" I mean the platform people choose when they want a computer)medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
ATI is the reason both Microsoft and Sony use AMDs APUs to power their consoles.It might be the reason why APUs even exist.
tipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
That was then, this is now. Now, AMD together with the acquisition, has a lower market cap than Nvidia.Murloc - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
yeah, no.ddriver - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
ATI wasn't bigger, AMD just paid a preposterous and entirely unrealistic amount of money for it. Soon after the merger, AMD + ATI was worth less than what they paid for the latter, ultimately leading to the loss of its foundries, putting it in an even worse position. Let's face it, AMD was, and historically has always been betrayed, its sole purpose is to create the illusion of competition so that the big boys don't look bad for running unopposed, even if this is what happens in practice.Just when AMD got lucky with Athlon a mole was sent to make sure AMD stays down.
testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
foundries didn't go because AMD bought ATI. That might have accelerated it by a few years however.Foundry issue and cost to AMD dates back to the 1990's and 2000-2001.
5150Joker - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
True, AMD was at a much better position in 2006 vs NVIDIA, they just got owned.3DVagabond - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
When was Intel the underdog? Because that's who's knocked them down (The aren't out yet.).