The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTTotal War: Attila
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Attila is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a large area with a fortress in the middle, making it a good GPU stress test.
Attila is the third win in a row for AMD at 4K. Here the R9 Fury X beats the GTX 980 Ti by 5% at the Max quality setting. However as this benchmark is very forward looking (read: ridiculously GPU intensive), the actual performance at 4K Max isn’t very good. No single GPU card can average 30fps here, and framerates will easily dip below 20fps. Since this is a strategy game we don’t have the same high bar for performance requirements, but sub-30fps still won’t cut it.
In which case we have to either compromise on quality or resolution, and in either case AMD’s lead dissolves. At 4K Quality and 1440p Max, the R9 Fury X trails the GTX 980 Ti by 8% and 3% respectively. And actually the 1440p results are still a good showing, but given AMD’s push for 4K, to lose to the GTX 980 Ti by more at the resolution they favor is a bit embarrassing.
Meanwhile, Atilla has always seemed to love pushing shaders more than anything else, so it comes as no great surprise that this game is a strong showing for the R9 Fury X relative to its predecessor. The performance gains at 4K are a consistent 52%, right at the top-end of our performance expectation window, and a bit smaller (but still impressive) 43% at 1440p.
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Navvie - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Which is not say I’m looking" (paragraph 5, first line).Missing a "to" I think.
watzupken - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Brilliant review. Well worth the wait. Thanks Ryan.Taracta - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
ROPs, ROPs, ROPs! Hows can they ~ double everything else and keep the same amount of ROPs and expect to win?Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
maybe something to do with cost or yieldtipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
They literally hit the size limits interposers can scale up to with this chip - so they can't make it any bigger to pack more transistors for more ROPs, until a die shrink. So they decided on a tradeoff, favouring other things than ROPs.Kevin G - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
They had a monster shader count and likely would be fine if they went to 3840 max to make room for more ROPs. 96 or 128 ROPs would have been impressive and really made this chip push lots of pixels. With HBM and the new delta color compression algorithm, there should be enough bandwidth to support these additional ROPs without bottle necking them.AMD also scaled the number of TMUs with the shaders but it likely wouldn't have hurt to have increased them by 50% too. Alternatively AMD could have redesigned the TMUs to have better 16 bit per channel texture support. Either of these changes would have put the texel throughput well beyond the GM200's theoretical throughput. I have a feeling that this is one of the bottlenecks that helps the GM200 pull ahead of Fiji.
tipoo - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Not saying it was the best tradeoff - just explaining. They quite literally could not go bigger in this case.testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
the performances scaling as resolution increase is better than Nvidia, implying the ROPs aren't the bottleneck...chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
No, that implies the shaders are the bottleneck at higher resolutions while ROP/fillrate/geometry remained constant. While Nvidia's bottleneck at lower resolutions isn't shader bound but their higher ROP/fillrate allows them to realize this benefit in actual FPS, AMD's ROPs are saturated and simply can't produce more frames.Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Right now there's not a lot of evidence for R9 Fury X being ROP limited. The performance we're seeing does not have any tell-tale signs of being ROP-bound, only hints here and there that may be the ROPs, or could just as well be the front-end.While Hawaii was due for the update, I'm not so sure we need to jump up in ROPs again so soon.