The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
As we briefly mentioned in our testing notes, our Battlefield 4 testing has been slightly modified as of this review to accommodate the changes in how AMD is supporting Mantle. This benchmark still defaults to Mantle for GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 cards (7970, 290X), but we’re using Direct3D for GCN 1.2 cards like the R9 Fury X. This is due to the lack of Mantle driver optimizations on AMD’s part, and as a result the R9 Fury X sees poorer performance here, especially at 2560x1440 (65.2fps vs. 54.3fps).
In any case, regardless of the renderer you pick, our first test does not go especially well for AMD and the R9 Fury X. The R9 Fury X does not take the lead at any resolution, and in fact this is one of the worse games for the card. At 4K AMD trails by 8-10%, and at 1440p that’s 16%. In fact the latter is closer to the GTX 980 than it is the GTX 980 Ti. Even with the significant performance improvement from the R9 Fury X, it’s not enough to catch up to NVIDIA here.
Meanwhile the performance improvement over the R9 290X “Uber” stands at between 23% and 32% depending on the resolution. AMD not only scales better than NVIDIA with higher resolutions, but R9 Fury X is scaling better than R9 290X as well.
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D. Lister - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"AMD had tessellation years before nVidia, but it went unused until DX11, by which time nVidia knew AMD's capabilities and intentionally designed a way to stay ahead in tessellation. AMD's own technology being used against it only because it released it so early. HBM, I fear, will be another example of this. AMD helped to develop HBM and interposer technologies and used them first, but I bet nVidia will benefit most from them."AMD is often first at announcing features. Nvidia is often first at implementing them properly. It is clever marketing vs clever engineering. At the end of the day, one gets more customers than the other.
sabrewings - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
While you're right that Nvidia paid for the chips used in 980 Tis, they're still most likely not fit for Titan X use and are cut to remove the underperforming sections. Without really knowing what their GM200 yields are like, I'd be willing to be the $1000 price of the Titan X was already paying for the 980 Ti chips. So, Nvidia gets to play with binned chips to sell at $650 while AMD has to rely on fully up chips added to an expensive interposer with more expensive memory and a more expensive cooling solution to meet the same price point for performance. Nvidia definitely forced AMD into a corner here, so as I said I would say they won.Though, I don't necessarily say that AMD lost, they just make it look much harder to do what Nvidia was already doing and making bookoo cash at that. This only makes AMD's problems worse as they won't get the volume to gain marketshare and they're not hitting the margins needed to heavily reinvest in R&D for the next round.
Kutark - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
So basically what you're saying is Nvidia is a better run company with smarter people working there.squngy - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
"and they cost more per chip to produce than AMD's Fiji GPU."Unless AMD has a genie making it for them that's impossible.
Not only is fiji larger, it also uses a totally new technology (HBM).
JumpingJack - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
"AMD had tessellation years before nVidia, but it went unused until DX11, by which time nVidia knew AMD's capabilities and intentionally designed a way to stay ahead in tessellation. AMD's own technology being used against it only because it released it so early. HBM, I fear, will be another example of this. AMD helped to develop HBM and interposer technologies and used them first, but I bet nVidia will benefit most from them."AMD fanboys make it sound like AMD can actually walk on water. AMD did work with Hynix, but the magic of HBM comes in the density from die stacking, which AMD did nothing (they are no longer the actual chipmaker as you probably know). As for interposers, this is not new technology, interposers are well established techniques for condensing an array of devices into one package.
AMD deserves credit for bringing the technology to market, no doubt, but their actually IP contribution is quite small.
ianmills - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Good that you are feeling better Ryan and thanks for the review :)That being said Anandtech needs keep us better informed when things come up.... The way this site handled it though is gonna lose this site readers...
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Ryan tweeted about the Fiji schedule several times and we were also open about it in the comments whenever someone asked, even though it wasn't relevant to the article in question. It's not like we were secretive about it and I think a full article of an article delay would be a little overkill.sabrewings - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Those tweets are even featured on the site in the side bar. Not sure how much clearer it could get without an article about a delayed article.testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Pipeline story... Dunno title, but, for text, explain it there. Have a link to THG as owned by same company now if readers want to read a review immediately.Twitter is non-ideal.
funkforce - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
The problem isn't only with the delays, it is that since Ryan took over as Editor in Chief I suspect his workload is too large.Because this also happened with the Nvidia GTX 960 review. He told 5-6 people (including me) for 5 weeks that it would come, and then it didn’t and he stopped responding to inquires about it.
Now in what way is that a good way to build a good relationship and trust between you and your readers?
I love Ryan's writing, this article was one of the best I've read in a long time. But not everyone is good at everything, maybe Ryan needs to focus on only GPU reviews and not running the site or whatever his other responsibilities are as Edit. in Chief.
Because the Reviews are what most ppl. come here for and what built this site. You guys are amazing, but AT never used to miss releasing articles the same day NDA was lifted in the past that I can remember. And promising things and then not delivering, sticking your head in the sand and not even apologizing isn’t a way to build up trust and uphold and strengthen the large following this site has.
I love this site, been reading it since the 1st year it came out, and that's why I care and I want you to continue and prosper.
Since a lot of ppl. can’t reed the twitter feed then what you did here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8923/nvidia-launches...
Is the way to go if something comes up, but then you have to deliver on your promises.