The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
As we briefly mentioned in our testing notes, our Battlefield 4 testing has been slightly modified as of this review to accommodate the changes in how AMD is supporting Mantle. This benchmark still defaults to Mantle for GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 cards (7970, 290X), but we’re using Direct3D for GCN 1.2 cards like the R9 Fury X. This is due to the lack of Mantle driver optimizations on AMD’s part, and as a result the R9 Fury X sees poorer performance here, especially at 2560x1440 (65.2fps vs. 54.3fps).
In any case, regardless of the renderer you pick, our first test does not go especially well for AMD and the R9 Fury X. The R9 Fury X does not take the lead at any resolution, and in fact this is one of the worse games for the card. At 4K AMD trails by 8-10%, and at 1440p that’s 16%. In fact the latter is closer to the GTX 980 than it is the GTX 980 Ti. Even with the significant performance improvement from the R9 Fury X, it’s not enough to catch up to NVIDIA here.
Meanwhile the performance improvement over the R9 290X “Uber” stands at between 23% and 32% depending on the resolution. AMD not only scales better than NVIDIA with higher resolutions, but R9 Fury X is scaling better than R9 290X as well.
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chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
What about geometry Ryan? ROPs are often used interchangeably with Geometry/Set-up engine, there is definitely something going on with Fury X at lower resolutions, in instances where SP performance is no problem, it just can't draw/fill pixels fast enough and performs VERY similarly to previous gen or weaker cards (290X/390X and 980). TechReport actually has quite a few theoreticals that show this, where their pixel fill is way behind GM200 and much closer to Hawaii/GM204.extide - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Yeah my bet is on Geometry. Check out the Synthetics page. It own the Pixel and Texel fillrate tests, but loses on the Tessellation test which has a large dependency on geometry. nVidia has also been historically very strong with geometry.CajunArson - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review! While the conclusions aren't really any different than all the other reputable review sites on the Interwebs, you were very thorough and brought an interesting perspective to the table too. Better late than never!NikosD - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
You must use the latest nightly build of LAV filters, in order to be able to use the 4K H.264 DXVA decoder of AMD cards.All previous builds fall back to SW mode.
tynopik - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"today’s launch of the Fiji GPU"andychow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Best review ever. Worth the wait. Get sick more often!tynopik - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
pg 2 - compression taking palcelimitedaccess - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Ryan, regarding Mantle performance back in the R9 285 review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-2... you wrote that AMD stated the issue with performance regression was that developers had not yet optimized for Tonga's newer architecture. While here you state that the performance regression is due to AMD having not optimized on the driver side. What is the actual case? What is the actual weighting given these three categories? -Hardware Driver
API
Software/Game
What I'm wondering is if we make an assumption that upcoming low level APIs will have similar behavior as Mantle what will happen going forward as more GPU architectures are introduced and newer games are introduced? If the onus shifts especially heavily towards the software side it it seems more realistic in practice that developers will have much more narrower scope in which optimize for.
I'm wondering if Anandtech could possibly look more indept into this issue as to how it pertains to the move towards low level APIs used in the future as it could have large implications in terms of the software/hardware support relationship going forward.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"What is the actual case? What is the actual weighting given these three categories? -"Right now the ball appears to be solidly in AMD's court. They are taking responsibility for the poor performance of certain Mantle titles on R9 Fury X.
As it stands I hesitate to read into this too much for DX12/Vulkan. Those are going to be finalized, widely supported APIs, unlike Mantle which has gone from production to retirement in the span of just over a year.
limitedaccess - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the response. I guess we will see more for certain as time moves on.My concern is if lower level APIs require more architecture specific optimizations and the burden is shifted to developers in practice that will cause some rather "interesting" implications.
Also what would be of interest is how much of reviewers test suites will still look at DX11 performance as a possible fallback should this become a possible issue.