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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
458 Comments
View All Comments
Navvie - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Which is not say I’m looking" (paragraph 5, first line).Missing a "to" I think.
watzupken - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Brilliant review. Well worth the wait. Thanks Ryan.Taracta - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
ROPs, ROPs, ROPs! Hows can they ~ double everything else and keep the same amount of ROPs and expect to win?Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
maybe something to do with cost or yieldtipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
They literally hit the size limits interposers can scale up to with this chip - so they can't make it any bigger to pack more transistors for more ROPs, until a die shrink. So they decided on a tradeoff, favouring other things than ROPs.Kevin G - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
They had a monster shader count and likely would be fine if they went to 3840 max to make room for more ROPs. 96 or 128 ROPs would have been impressive and really made this chip push lots of pixels. With HBM and the new delta color compression algorithm, there should be enough bandwidth to support these additional ROPs without bottle necking them.AMD also scaled the number of TMUs with the shaders but it likely wouldn't have hurt to have increased them by 50% too. Alternatively AMD could have redesigned the TMUs to have better 16 bit per channel texture support. Either of these changes would have put the texel throughput well beyond the GM200's theoretical throughput. I have a feeling that this is one of the bottlenecks that helps the GM200 pull ahead of Fiji.
tipoo - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Not saying it was the best tradeoff - just explaining. They quite literally could not go bigger in this case.testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
the performances scaling as resolution increase is better than Nvidia, implying the ROPs aren't the bottleneck...chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
No, that implies the shaders are the bottleneck at higher resolutions while ROP/fillrate/geometry remained constant. While Nvidia's bottleneck at lower resolutions isn't shader bound but their higher ROP/fillrate allows them to realize this benefit in actual FPS, AMD's ROPs are saturated and simply can't produce more frames.Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Right now there's not a lot of evidence for R9 Fury X being ROP limited. The performance we're seeing does not have any tell-tale signs of being ROP-bound, only hints here and there that may be the ROPs, or could just as well be the front-end.While Hawaii was due for the update, I'm not so sure we need to jump up in ROPs again so soon.