The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds the “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.
A pure and strenuous DirectX 11 test, Crysis 3 in this case is a pretty decent bellwether for the overall state of the R9 Fury X. Once again the card trails the GTX 980 Ti, but not by quite as much as we saw in Battlefield 4. In this case the gap is 6-7% at 4K, and 12% at 1440p, not too far off of 4% and 10% respectively. This test hits the shaders pretty hard, so of our tried and true benchmarks I was expecting this to be one of the better games for AMD, so the results in a sense do end up as surprising.
In any case, on an absolute basis this is also a good example of the 4K quality tradeoff. R9 Fury X is fast enough to deliver 1440p at high quality settings over 60fps, or 4K with reduced quality settings over 60fps. Otherwise if you want 4K with high quality settings, the performance hit means a framerate average in just the 30s.
Otherwise the gains over the R9 290XU are quite good. The R9 Fury X picks up 38-40% at 4K, and 36% at 1440p. This trends relatively close to our 40% expectations for the card, reinforcing just how big of a leap the card is for AMD.
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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.