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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testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
You don't need architecture improvements to use DX12/Vulkan/etc. The APIs merely allow you to implement them over DX11 if you choose to. You can write a DX12 game without optimizing for any GPUs (although, not doing so for GCN given consoles are GCN would be a tad silly).If developers are aiming to put low level stuff in whenever they can than the issue becomes that due to AMD's "GCN everywhere" approach developers may just start coding for PS4, porting that code to Xbox DX12 and than porting that to PC with higher textures/better shadows/effects. In which Nvidia could take massive performance deficites to AMD due to not getting the same amount of extra performance from DX12.
Don't see that happening in the next 5 years. At least, not with most games that are console+PC and need huge performance. You may see it in a lot of Indie/small studio cross platform games however.
RG1975 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
AMD is getting there but, they still have a little bit to go to bring us a new "9700 Pro". That card devastated all Nvidia cards back then. That's what I'm waiting for to come from AMD before I switch back.Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
would you say amd is now the "geforce fx 5800"piroroadkill - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Everyone who bought a Geforce FX card should feel bad, because the AMD offerings were massively better. But now AMD is close to NVIDIA, it's still time to rag on AMD, huh?That said, of course if I had $650 to spend, you bet your ass I'd buy a 980 Ti.
Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
oh believe me i remember they felt bad lol but im not ragging on amd but nvidia stole their thunder with the 980 tiKateH - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
C'mon, Fury isn't even close to the Geforce FX level of fail. It's really hard to overstate how bad the FX5800 was, compared to the Radeon 9700 and even the Geforce 4600Ti.The Fury X wins some 4K benchmarks, the 980Ti wins some. The 980Ti uses a bit less power but the Fury X is cooler and quieter.
Geforce FX level of fail would be if the Fury X was released 3 months from now to go up against the 980Ti with 390X levels of performance and an air cooler.
Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
To be fair the 5950 ultra was actually decentMorawka - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
your understating nvidia's scores.. the won 90% of all benchmarks, not just "some". a full 120W more power under furmark load and they are using HBM!!looncraz - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Furmark power load means nothing, it is just a good way to stress test and see how much power the GPU is capable of pulling in a worst-case scenario and how it behaves in that scenario.While gaming, the difference is miniscule and no one will care one bit.
Also, they didn't win 90% of the benchmarks at 4K, though they certainly did at 1440. However, the real world isn't that simple. A 10% performance difference in GPUs may as well be zero difference, there are pretty much no game features which only require a 10% higher performance GPU to use... or even 15%.
As for the value argument, I'd say they are about even. The Fury X will run cooler and quieter, take up less space, and will undoubtedly improve to parity or beyond the 980Ti in performance with driver updates. For a number of reasons, the Fury X should actually age better, as well. But that really only matters for people who keep their cards for three years or more (which most people usually do). The 980Ti has a RAM capacity advantage and an excellent - and known - overclocking capacity and currently performs unnoticeably better.
I'd also expect two Fury X cards to outperform two 980Ti cards with XFire currently having better scaling than SLI.
chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
The differences in minimums aren't miniscule at all, and you also seem to be discounting the fact 980Ti overclocks much better than Fury X. Sure XDMA CF scales better when it works, but AMD has shown time and again, they're completely unreliable for timely CF fixes for popular games to the point CF is clearly a negative for them right now.