The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. Since Fiji is based on the same GCN 1.2 architecture as Tonga (R9 285), we are not expecting too much new here.
First off we have tessellation performance. As we discussed in greater detail in our look at Fiji’s architecture, AMD has made some tessellation/geometry optimizations in GCN 1.2, and then went above and beyond that for Fiji. As a result tessellation performance on the R9 Fury X is even between than the R9 285 and the R9 290X, improving by about 33% in the case of TessMark. This is the best performing AMD product to date, besting even the R9 295X2. However AMD still won’t quite catch up to NVIDIA for the time being.
As for texture fillrates, the performance here is outstanding, though not unexpected. R9 Fury X has 256 texture units, the most of any single GPU card, and this increased texture fillrate is exactly in line with the theoretical predictions based on the increased number of texture units.
Finally, the 3DMark Vantage pixel fillrate test is not surprising, but it is none the less a solid and important outcome for AMD. Thanks to their delta frame buffer compression technology, they see the same kind of massive pixel fillrate improvements here as we saw on the R9 285 last year, and NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 series. At this point R9 Fury X’s ROPs are pushing more than 40 billion pixels per second, a better than 2x improvement over the R9 290X despite the identical ROP count, and an important reminder of the potential impact of the combination of compression and HBM’s very high memory bandwidth. AMD’s ROPs are reaching efficiency levels simply not attainable before.
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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.