The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top

The Talos Principle

Croteam’s first person puzzle and exploration game The Talos Principle may not involve much action, but the game’s lush environments still put even fast video cards to good use. Coupled with the use of 4x MSAA at Ultra quality, and even a tranquil puzzle game like Talos can make a good case for more powerful video cards.

Coming off of AMD’s poor Dragon Age performance, The Talos Principle offers the R9 Fury X a much-needed win. At 4K with Ultra quality settings the card is able to hit 57.2fps, just shy of 60fps. More importantly it’s ahead of not only the GTX 980 Ti, but the GTX Titan X as well, taking down both of NVIDIA’s flagships at once. The 9% lead over the GTX 980 Ti is one of the best AMD will see all day, so this is a game that’s clearly in AMD’s favor.

Do note however that AMD’s performance once again regresses at 1440p. It’s enough to retain the lead, if just barely, and tie the GTX Titan X. Thankfully for AMD this is an example of a game where a single GPU card is plenty for 4K gaming.

As for the R9 290X comparison, the results end up being very interesting. The R9 Fury X sees some very impressive gains here, improving over the R9 290X by 47% at 1440p and an amazing 60% at 4K. Given that the latter is outright outside our theoretical performance window for a shader-bound scenario, I suspect there’s more at play here than just GPU improvements. And sure enough, running the modified Catalyst 15.15 drivers on the R9 290X finds that performance improves by 21% at 4K, to 43.6fps, so it looks like AMD has been doing some optimizing for this game.