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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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/