The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 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.
As one of the few games that can hit 60fps on the R9 Fury at 4K with everything turned up, it’s interesting to see how resolution impacts all of our cards with Civilization. At 4K the R9 Fury is well ahead of the GTX 980, surpassing it by 17%. Yet at 1440p that lead becomes a very slight loss, with the Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury’s mild factory overclock giving it just enough of a boost to stay ahead of the GTX 980.
Meanwhile the Fury/Fury X gap widens ever so slightly here. The R9 Fury is now a full 10% behind the full-fledged Fury.
The minimum framerate situation for Civilization is very nearly a mirror of the averages. The R9 Fury does relatively well at 4K, but at 1440p it’s now neck-and-neck with the GTX 980 once again.
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FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Oh, gee, forgot, it's not amd's fault ... it was "developers and access" which is not amd's fault, either... of course...OMFG
redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
What's your excuse for being such an idiotic, despicable and ugly intel/nvidia fanboy? I don't know, maybe your parents? Somewhere you went wrong.OldSchoolKiller1977 - Sunday, July 26, 2015 - link
I am sorry and NVIDIA fan boys resort to name calling.... what was it that you said and I quote "Hypocrite" :)redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Your problem is deeper than just that you like intel/nvidia since you apparently hate people who don't like those, and ONLY because they like something different than you do.ant6n - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
A third way to look at it is that maybe AMD did it right.Let's say the chip is built from 80% stream processors (by area), the most redundant elements. If some of those functional elements fail during manufacture, they can disable them and sell it as the cheaper card. If something in the other 20% of the chip fails, the whole chip may be garbage. So basically you want a card such that if all the stream processors are functional, the other 20% become the bottleneck, whereas if some of the stream processors fail and they have to sell it as a simple Fury, then the stream processors become the bottleneck.
thomascheng - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
That is probably AMD's smart play. Fury was always the intended card. Perfect cards will be the X and perhaps less perfect card will be the Nano.FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
"fury was always the intended card"ROFL
amd fanboy out much ?
I mean it is unbelievable, what you said, and that you said it.
theduckofdeath - Friday, July 24, 2015 - link
Just shut up, Bubby.akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
Anand has been running DX12 benchmarks last spring. When they compared Radeon 290x to GTX 980 Ti nVidia ordered them to stop. That is why no more DX12 benchmarks have been run.Intel and nVidia are at a huge disadvantage with DX12 and Mantle.
The reason:
AMD IP: Asynchronous Shader Pipelines and Asynchronous Compute Engines.
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
We saw mantle benchmarks so your fantasy is a bad amd fanboy delusion.