The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTGRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layed with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Unfortunately for AMD, after a streak of wins and ties for AMD, things start going off the rails with GRID, very off the rails.
At 4K Ultra this is AMD’s single biggest 4K performance deficit; the card trails the GTX 980 Ti by 14%. The good news is that in the process the card cracks 60fps, so framerates are solid on an absolute basis, though there are still going to be some frames below 60fps for racing purists to contend with.
Where things get really bad is at 1440p, in a situation we have never seen before in a high-end AMD video card review. The R9 Fury X gets pummeled here, trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 30%, and even falling behind the GTX 980 and GTX 780 Ti. The reason it’s getting pummeled is because the R9 Fury X is CPU bottlenecked here; no matter what resolution we pick, the R9 Fury X can’t spit out more than about 82fps here at Ultra quality.
With GPU performance outgrowing CPU performance year after year, this is something that was due to happen sooner or later, and is a big reason that low-level APIs are about to come into the fold. And if it was going to happen anywhere, it would happen with a flagship level video card. Still, with an overclocked Core i7-4960X driving our testbed, this is also one of the most powerful systems available with respect to CPU performance, so AMD’s drivers are burning an incredible amount of CPU time here.
Ultimately GRID serves to cement our concerns about AMD’s performance at 1440p, as it’s very possible that this is the tip of the iceberg. DirectX 11 will go away eventually, but it will still take some time. In the meantime there are a number of 1440p gamers out there, especially with R9 Fury X otherwise being such a good fit for high frame rate 1440p gaming. Perhaps the biggest issue here is that this makes it very hard to justify pairing 1440p 144Hz monitors with AMD’s GPUs, as although 82.6fps is fine for a 60Hz monitor, these CPU issues are making it hard for AMD to deliver framerates more suitable/desirable for those high performance monitors.
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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.