The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTGRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layed with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Unfortunately for AMD, after a streak of wins and ties for AMD, things start going off the rails with GRID, very off the rails.
At 4K Ultra this is AMD’s single biggest 4K performance deficit; the card trails the GTX 980 Ti by 14%. The good news is that in the process the card cracks 60fps, so framerates are solid on an absolute basis, though there are still going to be some frames below 60fps for racing purists to contend with.
Where things get really bad is at 1440p, in a situation we have never seen before in a high-end AMD video card review. The R9 Fury X gets pummeled here, trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 30%, and even falling behind the GTX 980 and GTX 780 Ti. The reason it’s getting pummeled is because the R9 Fury X is CPU bottlenecked here; no matter what resolution we pick, the R9 Fury X can’t spit out more than about 82fps here at Ultra quality.
With GPU performance outgrowing CPU performance year after year, this is something that was due to happen sooner or later, and is a big reason that low-level APIs are about to come into the fold. And if it was going to happen anywhere, it would happen with a flagship level video card. Still, with an overclocked Core i7-4960X driving our testbed, this is also one of the most powerful systems available with respect to CPU performance, so AMD’s drivers are burning an incredible amount of CPU time here.
Ultimately GRID serves to cement our concerns about AMD’s performance at 1440p, as it’s very possible that this is the tip of the iceberg. DirectX 11 will go away eventually, but it will still take some time. In the meantime there are a number of 1440p gamers out there, especially with R9 Fury X otherwise being such a good fit for high frame rate 1440p gaming. Perhaps the biggest issue here is that this makes it very hard to justify pairing 1440p 144Hz monitors with AMD’s GPUs, as although 82.6fps is fine for a 60Hz monitor, these CPU issues are making it hard for AMD to deliver framerates more suitable/desirable for those high performance monitors.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
458 Comments
View All Comments
TallestJon96 - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
This card is not the disappointment people make it out to be. One month ago this card would have been a MASSIVE success. What is strange to me is that they didn't reduce price, even slightly to compete with the new 980 ti. I suspect it was to avoid a price war, but I would say at $600 this card is attractive, but at $650 you only really want it for water cooling. I suspect the price will drop more quickly than the 980 ti.mccoy3 - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
So it is as expensive as the 980Ti by delivering less performance and requires watercooling. Once Nvidia settles for a TITAN Y including HBM, its all over for the red guys.just4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Well that would be great news for AMD though wouldn't it since Nvidia would have to pay for the use of HBM in some form or another..Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
AMD could have released a hot leaf blower like the GTX 480 and chose not to.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
No, they couldn't have. Fury X is already a 275W and that's with the benefit of low temp leakage using a WC *AND* the benefit of a self-professed 15-20W TDP surplus from HBM. That means in order for Fury X to still fall 10% short of 980Ti, it is already using 25+20W, so 45W more power.Their CUSTOM cooled 7/8th cut Fury is going to be 275W typical board power as well and its cut down, so yeah the difference in functional unit power is most likely going to be the same as the difference in thermal leakage due to operating temperatures between water and custom air cooling. A hot leaf blower, especially one as poor as AMD's reference would only be able to cool a 6/8 cut Fiji or lower, but at that point you might as well get a Hawaii based card.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Your posts don't even try to sound sane. I wrote about the GTX 480, which was designed to run hot and loud. Nvidia also couldn't release a fully-enabled chip.Ignore the point about the low-grade cooler on the 480 which ran hot and was very loud.
Ignore the point about the card being set to run hot, which hurt performance per watt (see this article if you don't get it).
How much is Nvidia paying you to astroturf? Whatever it is, it's too much.
Margalus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
this AMD card pumps out more heat than any NVidia card. Just because it runs a tad cooler with water cooling doesn't mean the heat is not there. It's just removed faster with water cooling, but the heat is still generated and the card will blow out a lot more hot air into the room than any NVidia card.Oxford Guy - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
If you can't afford AC then stick with something like a 750 Ti. Otherwise the extra heat is hardly a big deal.zodiacfml - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
My excitement with HBM has subsided as I realized that this is too costly to be implemented in AMD's APUs even next year. Yet, I hope they do as soon as possible even if it would mean HBM on a narrower bus.jburns - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Probably the best graphics card review I've ever read! Detailed and balanced... Thanks Ryan for an excellent review.