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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chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Oh, and also forgot his biggest mistake was vastly overpaying for ATI, leading both companies on this downward spiral of crippling debt and unrealized potential.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Uh...Bulldozer happened on Ruiz's watch, and he also wasn't able to capitalize on K8's early performance leadership. Beyond that he orchestrated the sale of their fabs to ATIC culminating in the usurious take or pay WSA with GloFo that still cripples them to this day. But of course, it was no surprise why he did this, he traded AMD's fabs for a position as GloFo's CEO which he was forced to resign from in shame due to insider trading allegations. Yep, Ruiz was truly a crook but AMD fanboys love to throw stones at Huang. :Dtipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Nooo please put it back, it was so much better with Anandtech referring to AMD as the taint :PHOOfan 1 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
At least he didn't spell it "perianal"Wreckage - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
It's silly to paint AMD as the underdog. It was not that long ago that they were able to buy ATI (a company that was bigger than NVIDIA). I remember at the time a lot of people were saying that NVIDIA was doomed and could never stand up to the might of a combined AMD + ATI. AMD is not the underdog, AMD got beat by the underdog.Drumsticks - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
I mean, AMD has a market cap of ~2B, compared to 11B of Nvidia and ~140B of Intel. They also have only ~25% of the dGPU market I believe. While I don't know a lot about stocks and I'm sure this doesn't tell the whole story, I'm not sure you could ever sell Nvidia as the underdog here.Kjella - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Sorry but that is plain wrong as nVidia wasn't just bigger than ATI, they were bigger than AMD. Their market cap in Q2 2006 was $9.06 billion, on the purchase date AMD was worth $8.84 billion and ATI $4.2 billion. It took a massive cash/stock deal worth $5.6 billion to buy ATI, including over $2 billion in loans. AMD stretched to the limit to make this happen, three days later Intel introduced the Core 2 processor and it all went downhill from there as AMD couldn't invest more and struggled to pay interest on falling sales. And AMD made an enemy of nVidia, which Intel could use to boot nVidia out of the chipset/integrated graphics market by not licensing QPI/DMI with nVidia having nowhere to go. It cost them $1.5 billion, but Intel has made back that several times over since.kspirit - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
That was pretty savage of Intel, TBH. I'm impressed.Iketh - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
or you could say AMD purposely finalized the purchase just before Core2 was introduced... after Core2, the purchase would have been impossibleWreckage - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/24/technology/nvidia_...AMD was worth $8.5B and ATI was worth $5B at the time of the merger making them worth about twice what NVIDIA was worth at the time ($7B)
In 2004 NVIDIA had a market cap of $2.4B and ATI was at $4.3B nearly twice.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidias-market-sh...
NVIDIA was the underdog until the combined AMD+ATI collapsed and lost most of their value. They are Goliath brought down by David.