The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTOverclocking
Finally, no review of a high-end video card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.
To get right to the point here, overclockers looking at out of the box overclocking performance are going to come away disappointed. While cooling and power delivery are overbuilt, in other respects the R9 Fury X is very locked down when it comes to overclocking. There is no voltage control at this time (even unofficial), there is no official HBM clockspeed control, and the card’s voltage profile has been finely tuned to avoid needing to supply the card with more voltage than is necessary. As a result the card has relatively little overclocking potential without voltage adjustments.
So what do we get for overclocking?
| Radeon R9 Fury X Overclocking | ||||
| Stock | Overclocked | |||
| Boost Clock | 1050Mhz | 1125MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 1Gbps (500MHz DDR) | 1Gbps (500MHz DDR) | ||
| Max Voltage | N/A | N/A | ||
Our efforts net us 75MHz, which is actually 25MHz less than what AMD published in their reviewer’s guide. Even 100MHz would lead to artifacting in some games, requiring that we step down to a 75MHz overclock to have a safe and sustainable overclock.
The end result is that the overclocked R9 Fury X runs at 1125MHz core and 1Gbps memory, a 75MHz (7%) increase in the GPU clockspeed and 0% increase in the memory clockspeed. This puts a very narrow window on expected performance gains, as we shouldn’t exceed a 7% gain in any game, and will almost certainly come in below 7% in most games.
Our gaming benchmarks find just that. A few percent performance improvement there, a 5% improvement there. Overall we wouldn’t go as far as saying there no reason to overclock, but with such limited gains it’s hardly worth the trouble right now.
True overclocking is going to have to involve BIOS modding, a riskier and warranty-voiding strategy, but one that should be far more rewarding. With more voltage I have little doubt that R9 Fury X could clock higher, though it’s impossible to guess by how much at this time. In any case the card is certainly built for it, as the oversized cooler, high power delivery capabilities, and dual BIOS switch provide all the components necessary for such an overclocking attempt.
Meanwhile HBM is a completely different bag, and while unofficial overclocking is looking promising, as a new technology it will take some time to get a good feel for it and understand just what kind of performance improvements it can deliver. The R9 Fury X is starting out with quite a bit of memory bandwidth right off the bat (512GB/sec), so it may not be bandwidth starved as often as other cards like the R9 290X was.
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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.