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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mickulty - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Looks fantastic! Definitely getting one of these once the stock is there.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Yes paper launch for the r9 390X ... newegg is dry as a bone and just 15 reviews with zero stock only sapphire had about 10 cards to sell otherwise NO STOCK AT NEWEGG AT ALL.it's july 16th and the r9 390x is vapor
figus77 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Got a Sapphire Fury Tri-X (non OC version) the 16/7 in Italy... probably is newegg problem... and really is a good card, with catalyst 15.7 i got very nice results... With my system 8320, 16gb 1600hz, in Tomb Raider 2560x1440 all maxed out with TressFX on, FPS MIN: 58,0 - MED: 75,3 - MAX: 94,0Really good results. Witcher3 run stable beetween 45 to 50 fps in ultra setting in 2560x1440 and that casr is really silent you can't hear anything even after some long time playing.
Jtaylor1986 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Almost makes you wonder if AMD should have just designed the card with 54 compute units and would have had a winner on it's hand. Fury X seems to be somewhat unbalanced in terms of it's hardware configuration.Asomething - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
This imbalance comes from gcn's limitations, amd tried to compensate with the extra shaders.Ranger101 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Another quality Gpu review from Anandtech, in addition to being so early. Best of both worlds.jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
The sapphire Tri-X cooling solutions performs impressively under load. I think this a consequence of the abysmal configuration forced on videocards by the ATX standard. The sapphire card can exhaust the hot air freely because of the short PCB, which proves we could use a replacement for ATX (or shorter PCB's)Ian Cutress - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It would be interesting to see the effect of having 2 or 3 cards in one system using that paradigm for sure.jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
interesting for sure, any change sapphire will send another card?jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
speaking of which, what happened to BTX?