The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. Since Fiji is based on the same GCN 1.2 architecture as Tonga (R9 285), we are not expecting too much new here.
First off we have tessellation performance. As we discussed in greater detail in our look at Fiji’s architecture, AMD has made some tessellation/geometry optimizations in GCN 1.2, and then went above and beyond that for Fiji. As a result tessellation performance on the R9 Fury X is even between than the R9 285 and the R9 290X, improving by about 33% in the case of TessMark. This is the best performing AMD product to date, besting even the R9 295X2. However AMD still won’t quite catch up to NVIDIA for the time being.
As for texture fillrates, the performance here is outstanding, though not unexpected. R9 Fury X has 256 texture units, the most of any single GPU card, and this increased texture fillrate is exactly in line with the theoretical predictions based on the increased number of texture units.
Finally, the 3DMark Vantage pixel fillrate test is not surprising, but it is none the less a solid and important outcome for AMD. Thanks to their delta frame buffer compression technology, they see the same kind of massive pixel fillrate improvements here as we saw on the R9 285 last year, and NVIDIA’s Maxwell 2 series. At this point R9 Fury X’s ROPs are pushing more than 40 billion pixels per second, a better than 2x improvement over the R9 290X despite the identical ROP count, and an important reminder of the potential impact of the combination of compression and HBM’s very high memory bandwidth. AMD’s ROPs are reaching efficiency levels simply not attainable before.
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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.