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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Sefem - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
"Draw calls are the best metric we have right now to compare AMD Radeon to nVidia ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD."Well, lets just for a moment consider this as true (and you should try to explain why :D )
Looking at draw calls a GTX 980 should perform 2.5x faster than a 290X in DX11 (respectively 2.62M vs 1.05M draw calls) and even a GTX 960 would be 2.37x faster than the over mentioned 290X (respectively 2.49M vs 1.05M draw calls) :)
D. Lister - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Performing minor optimizations, on an API that isn't even out yet, to give themselves the appearance of a theoretical advantage in some arbitrary GPU function, as a desperate attempt to keep themselves relevant, is so very AMD (their motto should be, "we will take your money now, and give you its worth... later..., maybe.)Meanwhile people at NV are optimizing for the API that is currently actually being used to make games, and raising their stock value and market share while they're at it.
Why wouldn't AMD optimize for DX11, and instead do what it's doing? Because DX11 is a mature API, so any further improvements would be small, yet expensive, while DX12 isn't even out yet, so it would be comparatively cheaper to get bigger gains, and AMD is seriously low on funds.
Realistically, proper DX12 games are stll 2-3 years away. By that time AMD probably wouldn't even be around anymore.
Hence, in conclusion, whatever DX12 performance the Fury trio (or AMD in general) claims, means absolutely nothing at this point.
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Thank GOD for nvidia or amd would have this priced so sky high no one could afford it.Instead of crazy high scalping greedy pricing amd only greeded up on price perf the tiny bit it could since it can't beat nvidia, who saved our wallets again !
THANK YOU NVIDIA ! YOUR COMPETITION HAS KEPT THE GREEDY RED TEAM FROM EXHORBITANT OVERPRICING LIKE THEY DID ON THEIR 290 SERIES !
f0d - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
i wasnt really impressed with the fury-x at its price point and performancethis normal fury seems a bit better at it price point than the fury-x does
as i write this the information on overclocking wasnt finished - i sure hope the fury overclocks much better than fury-x did because that was a massive letdown when it came to overclocking, when nvidia can get some crazy high overclocks with its maxwell it kinda makex the fury line seem not as good with its meager overclocks the fury-x had
hopefully fury (non x) overclocks like a beast like the nvidia cards do
noladixiebeer - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
AMD haven't unlocked the voltage yet on Fury X. Hopefully, they will unlock the voltage cap soon, so the Fury X should be able to overclock better. Better than 980ti? We'll see, but Fury X still has lots of uptapped resources.Chaser - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Don't hold you breath. There is very little overhead in Fiji. That's clearly been divulged. As the article states Maxwell is very efficient and has a good deal of room for partners to indulge themselves. Especially the Ti.chrnochime - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
The WC for the X makes up ~half of the price increase from non-x. For someone who's going to do moderate OC and don't want to bother doing WC conversion the X is a good choice, even over a Ti.cmdrdredd - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
no it's not...the 980ti bests it handily. It's not a good choice at all when 980ti can overclock as well and many coolers have 0rpm fan modes for when it's at idle or very low usage.akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
You haven't seen the DX12 Benchmarks yet. Anand has been keeping them from you. Once you see how much Radeon crushes nVidia you would never buy green again.nVidia silicon is RUBBISH with DX12 and Mantle. Radeon 290x is 33% faster than GTX 980Ti.
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
sefem already told you..." "Draw calls are the best metric we have right now to compare AMD Radeon to nVidia ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD."
Well, lets just for a moment consider this as true (and you should try to explain why :D )
Looking at draw calls a GTX 980 should perform 2.5x faster than a 290X in DX11 (respectively 2.62M vs 1.05M draw calls) and even a GTX 960 would be 2.37x faster than the over mentioned 290X (respectively 2.49M vs 1.05M draw calls) :) "
Now go back to stroking your amd spider platform.