The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The final game in our review of the R9 Fury X is our most recent addition, Grand Theft Auto V. The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
Our final game sees the R9 Fury X go out on either an average or slightly worse than average note, depending on the settings and resolution we are looking at. At our highest 4K settings the R9 Fury X trails the GTX 980 Ti once again, this time by 10%. Worse, at 1440p it’s now 15%. On the other hand if we run at our lower, more playable 4K settings, then the gap is only 5%, roughly in line with the overall average 4K performance gap between the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X.
In this case it’s probably to AMD’s benefit that our highest 4K settings aren’t actually playable on a single GPU card, as the necessary drop in quality gets them closer to NVIDIA’s performance. On the other hand this does reiterate the fact that right now many games will force a tradeoff between resolution and quality if you wish to pursue 4K gaming.
Finally, the performance gains relative to the R9 290X are pretty good. 29% at 1440p, and 44% at the lower quality playable 4K resolution setting.
Shifting gears to 99th percentile frametimes however – a much-welcome feature of the game’s built-in benchmark – finds that AMD doesn’t fare nearly as well. At the 99th percentile the R9 Fury X trails the GTX 980 Ti at all times, and significantly so. The deficit is anywhere between 26% at 1440p to 40% at 4K Very High.
What’s happening here is a combination of multiple factors. First and foremost, next to Shadow of Mordor, GTAV is our other VRAM busting game. This, I believe, is why 99th percentile performance dives so hard at 4K Very High for the R9 Fury X, as it only has 4GB of VRAM compared to 6GB on the GTX 980 Ti. But considering where the GTX 980 places – above the R9 Fury X – I also believe there’s more than just VRAM bottlenecking occurring here. The GTX 980 sees at least marginally better framerates with the same size VRAM pool (and a lot less of almost everything else), which leads me to believe that AMD’s drivers may be holding them back here. Certainly the R9 290X comparison lends some possible credit to that, as the 99th percentile gains are under 20%. Regardless, one wouldn’t expect to be VRAM limited at 1440p or 4K without MSAA, especially as this test was not originally designed to bust 4GB cards.
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Chaser - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Oh yeah that invalidated the entire review. /facepalmStrychn9ne - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great review here! It was a good read going through all the technical details of the card I must say. The Fury X is an awesome card for sure. I am trying to wait for next gen to buy a new card as my 280X is holding it's own for now, but this thing makes it tempting not to wait. As for the performance, I expect it will perform better with the next driver release. The performance is more than fine even now despite the few losses it had in the benches. I suspect that AMD kind of rushed the driver out for this thing and didn't get enough time to polish it fully. The scaling down to lower resolutions kind of points that way for me anyways.Peichen - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
AMD/ATI, what a fail. Over the past 15 years I have only gone Nvidia twice for 6600GT and 9800GT but now I am using a GTX 980. Not a single mid-range/high-end card in AMD/ATI's line up is correctly priced. Lower price by 15-20% to take into account the power usage, poor driver and less features will make them more competitivejust4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
At the high end you "may" have a point.. but what is the 960 bringing to the table against the 380? Not much.. not much at all. How about the 970 vs the 390? Again.. not much.. and in crossfire/sli situations the 390 (in theory..) should be one helluva bang for the buck 4k setup.There will be a market for the FuryX.. and considering the efforts they put into it I don't believe it's going to get the 15-20% price drop your hoping for.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Slightly better performance while pulling less power and putting out less heat, and in the 970's case, is currently about $10 cheaper. Given that crossfire is less reliable than SLI, why WOULD you buy an AMD card?Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Maybe because people want decent performance above 3.5 GB of VRAM? Or they don't appreciate bait and switch, being lied to (ROP count, VRAM speed, nothing about the partitioning in the specs, cache size).medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Freesync?Built-in water cooling?
Disgust for nVidia's shitty buisness practices?
A brain?
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
How do you feel about the business practice of sending out a card with faults that you claimed were fixed?Or claims that you had the world's fastest GPU enabled by HBM?
Or claims/benches that your card was faster than 980Ti?
Or claims that your card was an Overclocker's Dream when it is anything but that and OCs 10% max?
A brain right? :)
sa365 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
How do you feel about the business practice of sending out a card with faulty, cheating drivers that lower IQ despite what you set in game so you can win/cheat in those said benchmarks. It's supposed to be apples to apples not apples to mandarins?How about we wait until unwinder writes the software for voltage unlocks before we test overclocking, those darn fruits again huh?
Nvidia will cheat their way through anything it seems.
It's pretty damning when you look at screens side by side, no AF Nvidia.
Margalus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
freesync? not as good as gsync and is still not free. It takes similar hardware added to the monitor just like gsync.built in water cooling? just something else to go wrong and be more expensive to repair, with the possibility of it ruining other computer components.
Disgust for NVidia's shitty business practices? what are those? Do you mean like not giving review samples of your cards to honest review sites because they told the truth about their cards so now you are afraid that they will tell the truth about your newest pos? Sounds like you should really hate AMD's shitty business practices.