The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Unlike Battlefield 4 where we needed to switch back to DirectX for performance reasons on the R9 Fury X, AMD’s latest card still holds up rather well on Mantle here, probably due to the fact that Civilization is a newer game. Though not drawn in this chart, what we find is that AMD loses a frame or two per second for running Mantle, but in return they see far, far better minimums (more on that later).
Overall then the R9 Fury X looks pretty good at 4K. Even at Ultra quality it can deliver a better than 60fps average and is within 2% of the GTX 980 Ti. On the other hand AMD struggles a bit more at 1440p, where the absolute framerate is still rather high, but relative to the GTX 980 Ti it’s now an 11% performance gap. This being a Mantle game, the fact that AMD does fall behind is a bit surprising, as at a high level they should be enjoying the CPU benefits of the low-level API. We’ll revisit 1440p performance a bit later on, but this is going to be a recurring quirk for AMD, and a detriment for 1440p 144Hz monitor owners.
The bigger advantage of Mantle is really the minimum framerates, and here the R9 Fury X soars. At 4K the R9 Fury X delivers a minimum framerate of 50.5fps, some 20% better than the GTX 980 Ti. Both cards do well enough here, but it goes without saying that this is a very distinct difference, and one that is well in AMD’s favor. The only downside for AMD here is that they can’t keep this advantage at 1440p, where they go back to trailing the GTX 980 Ti in minimum framerates by 7%.
On that note I do have one concern here with AMD’s support plans for Mantle. Mainly I’m worried that as well as the R9 Fury X does here, there’s a risk Mantle may stop working in the future. The GCN 1.2 based R9 285 can’t use the Mantle path at all (it crashes), and the R9 Fury X is not all that different in architecture.
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mikato - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Wow very interesting, thanks bugsy. I hope those guys at the various forums can work out the details and maybe a reputable tech reviewer will take a look.OrphanageExplosion - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
I'm still a bit perplexed about how AMD gets an absolute roasting for CrossFire frame-pacing - which only impacted a tiny amount of users - while the sub-optimal DirectX 11 driver (which will affect everyone to varying extents in CPU-bound scenarios) doesn't get anything like the same level of attention.I mean, AMD commands a niche when it comes to the value end of the market, but if you're combining a budget CPU with one of their value GPUs, chances are that in many games you're not going to see the same kind of performance you see from benchmarks carried out on mammoth i7 systems.
And here, we've reached a situation where not even the i7 benchmarking scenario can hide the impact of the driver on a $650 part, hence the poor 1440p performance (which is even worse at 1080p). Why invest all that R&D, time, effort and money into this mammoth piece of hardware and not improve the driver so we can actually see what it's capable of? Is AMD just sitting it out until DX12?
harrydr - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
With the black screen problem of r9 graphic cards not easy to support amd.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Because lying to customers about VRAM performance, ROP count, and cache size is a far better way to conduct business.Oh, and the 970's specs are still false on Nvidia's website (claims 224 GB/s but that is impossible because of the 28 GB/s partition and the XOR contention — the more the slow partition is used the closer the other partition can get to the theoretical speed of 224 but the more it's used the more the faster partition is slowed by the 28 GB/s sloth — so a catch-22).
It's pretty amazing that Anandtech came out with a "Correcting the Specs" article but Nvidia is still claiming false numbers on their website.
Peichen - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
And yet 970 is still faster. Nvidia is more efficient with resources than they let people on.Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
The XOR contention and 28 GB/s sure is efficiency. If only the 8800 GT could have had VRAM that slow back in 2007.Gunbuster - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Came for the chizow, was not disappointed.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
:)madwolfa - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
"Throw a couple of these into a Micro-ATX SFF PC, and it will be the PSU, not the video cards, that become your biggest concern".I think the biggest concern here would be to fit a couple of 120mm radiators.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
My current Micro-ATX case has room for dual 120mm rads and a 240mm rad. plenty of room there