The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. Since Fiji is based on the same GCN 1.2 architecture as Tonga (R9 285), we are not expecting too much new here.
First off we have tessellation performance. As we discussed in greater detail in our look at Fiji’s architecture, AMD has made some tessellation/geometry optimizations in GCN 1.2, and then went above and beyond that for Fiji. As a result tessellation performance on the R9 Fury X is even between than the R9 285 and the R9 290X, improving by about 33% in the case of TessMark. This is the best performing AMD product to date, besting even the R9 295X2. However AMD still won’t quite catch up to NVIDIA for the time being.
As for texture fillrates, the performance here is outstanding, though not unexpected. R9 Fury X has 256 texture units, the most of any single GPU card, and this increased texture fillrate is exactly in line with the theoretical predictions based on the increased number of texture units.
Finally, the 3DMark Vantage pixel fillrate test is not surprising, but it is none the less a solid and important outcome for AMD. Thanks to their delta frame buffer compression technology, they see the same kind of massive pixel fillrate improvements here as we saw on the R9 285 last year, and NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 series. At this point R9 Fury X’s ROPs are pushing more than 40 billion pixels per second, a better than 2x improvement over the R9 290X despite the identical ROP count, and an important reminder of the potential impact of the combination of compression and HBM’s very high memory bandwidth. AMD’s ROPs are reaching efficiency levels simply not attainable before.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
The current tools do not report VRM temperatures for the card (AFAIK). I've taken an IR thermometer to the card as well, though there's nothing terribly interesting to report there.guld82 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Civilization: Beyond EarthThe bigger advantage of Mantle is really the minimum framerates, and here the R9 Fury X soars. At 1440p the R9 Fury X delivers a minimum framerate of 50.5fps
1440p should be changed to 4k
jeffrey - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Ryan Smith, any update on GTX 960Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
As soon as Fury is out of the way.chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Fair review Ryan, unfortunately for AMD Fury X will go down as an underwhelming product that failed to meet the overhyped build up from AMD and their fans. Its not a terrible product by itself, as it does perform quite well, but it simply didn't live up to its billing, much of which came directly from AMD themselves when they made very public claims like:1) HBM enables them to make the World's Fastest GPU. This didn't happen.
2) Easily beats the 980Ti, based on their internal benchmarks. This didn't happen either.
3) Fury X is an Overclocker's Dream. We've seen anything but this being the case.
4) Water Cooling allows this to be a cool and quiet part. Except that pump whine, that AMD said was fixed in shipping samples, but wasn't.
5) 4GB is enough. Doesn't look like it, especially at the resolutions and settings a card like this is expected to run.
Add to that the very limited supply at launch and Fury X launch will ultimately be viewed as a flop. I just don't know where AMD is going to go from here. R9 300 Rebrandeon happened (told you AMD fanboys this months ago) and those parts still aren't selling. R9 Fury X while still AMD's best performing part is still 3rd fastest overall at the same price point as the faster 980Ti, and in extremely limited supplies. Will this be enough to sustain AMD into 2016 where the hopes of Zen and Arctic Islands turning around their fortunes loom on the horizon, we'll see, but until then it will be a bumpy road for AMD with some cloudy skies on the horizon!
Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
i fear thisStuka87 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
The pump whine was fixed. Only very early cards have the old pump, later cards do not. And even with the louder pump, its STILL quieter than a reference 980Ti.chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Even if that is the case, that's not what AMD was telling the press when it was brought to their attention during the review phase. Obviously it would be difficult, if not impossible for AMD to correct the problem in shipping samples given how rushed they were just getting review samples out to the press.AMD was dishonest about the pump issue plain and simple, and just hope the pump whine falls below any individual's noise tolerance thresholds.
As for comparisons to 980Ti, the Fury X will certainly be quieter in terms of pure dB under load, but the noise profile of that pump whine is going to be far more disturbing at any other point in time.
mapesdhs - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Beats me why nobody makes more of the practicality issues of trying to fit such a card in a case which in all likelyhood (for this class of GPU) _already has_ a water cooler for the CPU, and don't get me started on how one is supposed to cram in two of these things for CF (not that I'd bother given the state of the drivers; any DX9 fix yet? It's been over a year).Without a clear performance advantage, which it doesn't have, it needed to be usefully cheaper, which it's not. Add in the lesser VRAM and no HDMI 2.0 and IMO AMD has blown this one. it wouldn't be so bad except it was AMD that chucked out much of the prelaunch hype. Other sites have differences to the 980 Ti a lot more than 10% at 1440 (less so at 4K of course, though with only 4GB and CF build issues I don't see 4K as being a fit for this card anyway). Factory oc'd 980 Tis are only a little more, but significantly quicker even at 4K.
chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Yeah, Fury X is not really a smaller form factor, its just different. Fitting that double thick rad is going to pose a much bigger problem for most cases vs. a full sized 9.5" blower, given Nvidia's NVTTM reference fits most any mini-ITX case that can take 2 slots.As for Fury X price and perf, I think the 980Ti preemptively cut into AMD's plans and they just didn't want to take another cut in price when they had their sights set on that $800+ range. But yeah Fury X and by proxy, Fury Air and Fury Nano will be extremely vulnerable at 1080p and 1440p given they will be slower than Fury X which already has slower and last-gen cards like the 290X/390X/780Ti and GTX 980 on its heels.
I don't think AMD could've afforded more price compression or there's simply no spots that make any sense for Fury Air and Fury Nano, which again goes to my point they should've just launched these parts as the top end of their new R9 300 series stack instead of Rebrandeon + Fury strategy.