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%.
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chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
While Intel wasn't the underdog in terms of marketshare, they were in terms of technology and performance with the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium 4. Intel had a dog on their hands that they managed to weather the storm with, until they got Conroe'd in 2006. Now, they are down and most likely out, as Zen even if it delivers as promised (40% IPC increase just isn't enough) will take years to gain traction in the CPU market. Time AMD simply does not have, especially given how far behind they've fallen in the dGPU market.nikaldro - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
That's 40% over excavator, so about 60%? over vishera.If they manage to get good enough IPC on 8 cores, at a good price, they may really make a comeback
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Well, best of luck with this. :)bgo - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Well during the P4 era Intel bribed OEMs to not use Athlon chips, which they later had to pay $1.25bn to AMD for. While one could argue the monetary losses may have been partially made up for, the settlement came at the end of 2009, so too little too late. Intel bought themselves time with their bribes, and that's what really enabled them to weather the storms.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
No, if you read the actual results and AMD's own testimony, they couldn't produce enough chips and offer them at a low enough price to OEMs compared to what Intel was just giving away as subsidies.piiman - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
" AMD got beat by the underdog. "And that makes them the underdog now.
boozed - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Mantle is essentially depreciated at this point"Deprecated, surely?
chrisgon - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Which is not say I’m looking to paint a poor picture of the company – AMD Is nothing if not the perineal underdog who constantly manages to surprise us with what they can do with less"I think the word you were looking for is perennial. Unless you truly meant to refer to AMD as the taint.
ArKritz - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
I think there's about a 50-50 chance of that...ingwe - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the effort that went into this article. I hope you are feeling better.In general this article makes me continue to feel sad for AMD.