The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect that current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
Shadow of Mordor ends up being a big win for AMD, with the R9 Fury cards shooting well past the GTX 980. Based on our earlier R9 Fury X review this was not an unexpected result, but at the end of the day with a 20%+ performance advantage, it’s a great situation for AMD to be in.
Meanwhile the R9 Fury’s performance relative to its X-rated sibling is yet again in the 7% range. So far the performance difference between the two cards is surprisingly consistent.
Finally, since AMD’s last two $550 cards were the R9 290X and HD 7970, let’s take a look at those comparisons quickly. At 1440p the R9 Fury only has a 17% lead over the R9 290X “Uber”, which for a card almost 2 years old is more than a bit surprising. The R9 Fury has more efficient front-ends and back-ends and significant advantages in shader throughput and memory bandwidth, and yet the performance gains compared to 290X are fairly small. On the other hand 7970 owners looking to upgrade to another Radeon should like what they’re seeing, as the R9 Fury’s 79% performance advantage is approaching upgrade territory.
Shifting gears to minimum framerates, the situation is similarly in AMD’s favor at 4K. One of the outcomes of going up against the GTX 980 is that it’s just as VRAM-limited as R9 Fury is, so in a VRAM intensive game like Shadow of Mordor, neither card has an advantage. However it’s quite interesting that once we back off to 1440p, the GTX 980 surges forward.
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akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
Radeon 290x is 33% faster than 980 Ti with DX12 and Mantle. It is equal to Titan X.http://wccftech.com/amd-r9-290x-fast-titan-dx12-en...
Sefem - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
You should stop reading wccftech.com this site is full of sh1t! you made also an error because they are comparing 290x to 980 and not the Ti!Asd :D I'm still laughing... those moron cited PCper's numbers as fps, they probably made the assumption since are 2 digit numbers but that's because PCper show numbers in million!!! look at that http://www.pcper.com/files/imagecache/article_max_...
wccftech.com also compare the the 290x on Mantle with the 980 on DX12, probably for an apple to apple comparison ;), the fun continue if you read this Futurmark's not on this particular benchmark, that essentially says something pretty obvious, number of draw calls don't reflect actual performance and thus shouldn't be used to compare GPU's
http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1...
Finally I think there's something wrong with PC world's results since NVIDIA should deliver more draw calls than AMD on DX11.
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
They told us Fury X was 20% and more faster, they lied then, too.Now amd fanboys need DX12 as a lying tool.
Failure requires lying, for fanboys.
Drumsticks - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Man auto correct plus an early morning post is hard. I meant "do you expect more optimized drivers to cause the Fury to leap further ahead of the 980, or the Fury X to catch up to the 980 Ti" haha. My bad.My first initial impression on that assessment would be yes, but I'm not an expert so I was wondering how many people would like to weigh in.
Samus - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Fuji has a lot more room for driver improvement and optimization than maxwell, which is quite well optimized by now. I'd expect the fury x to tie the 980ti in the near future, especially in dx12 games. But nvidia will probably have their new architecture ready by then.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
So, Nvidia is faster, and has been for many months, and still is faster, but a year or two into the future when amd finally has dxq12 drivers and there are actually one or two Dx12 games,why then, amd will have a card....
MY GOD HOW PATHETIC. I mean it sounded so good, you massaging their incompetence and utter loss.
evolucion8 - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Your continuous AMD bashing is more pathetic. Check the performance numbers of the GTX 680 when it was launched and check where it stands now? Do the same thing with the GTX 780 and then with the GTX 970, then talk.CiccioB - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
That is another confirmation that AMD GCN doesn't scale well. That problem was already seen with Hawaii, but also Tahiti showed it's inefficiency with respect to smaller GPUs like Pitcairn.Nvidia GPUs scales almost linearly with respect to the resources integrated into the chip.
This has been a problem for AMD up to now, but it would be worse with new PP, as if no changes to solve this are introduced, nvidia could enlarge its gap with respect to AMD performances when they both can more than double the number of resources on the same die area.
Sdriver - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
This resources reduction just means that AMD performance bottleneck is somewhere else in card. We have to see that this kind of reduction is not made to purposely slow down a card but to reduce costs or to utilize chips which didn't pass all tests to become a X model. AMD is know to do that since their weird but very functional 3 cores Phenons. Also this means if they can work better on the real bottleneck, they will be able to make a stronger card with much less resources, who remembers the HD 4770?...akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
@ Ryan SmithThis review is actually a BIG LIE.
ANAND is hiding the DX12 results that show 390x outperforming GTX 980Ti by 33%+, Fury outperforming 980ti by almost 50% and Titan X by almost 20%.
Figures do not lie. BUT LIARS FIGURE.
Draw calls are the best metric we have right now to compare AMD Radeon to nVidia ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.
You can not render and object before you draw it!
I dare you to run the 3dMark API Overhead Feature Tests on Fury show how Mantle and DX12 turns nVidia siliocn into RUBBISH.
Radeon 290x CRUSHES 980Ti by 33% and is just a bit better than Titan X.
www dot eteknix.com/amd-r9-290x-goes-head-to-head-with-titan-x-with-dx12/
"AMD R9 290X As Fast As Titan X in DX12 Enabled 3DMark – 33% Faster Than GTX 980"
www dot wccftech dot com/amd-r9-290x-fast-titan-dx12-enabled-3dmark-33-faster-gtx-980/