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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Chaser - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Oh yeah that invalidated the entire review. /facepalmStrychn9ne - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great review here! It was a good read going through all the technical details of the card I must say. The Fury X is an awesome card for sure. I am trying to wait for next gen to buy a new card as my 280X is holding it's own for now, but this thing makes it tempting not to wait. As for the performance, I expect it will perform better with the next driver release. The performance is more than fine even now despite the few losses it had in the benches. I suspect that AMD kind of rushed the driver out for this thing and didn't get enough time to polish it fully. The scaling down to lower resolutions kind of points that way for me anyways.Peichen - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
AMD/ATI, what a fail. Over the past 15 years I have only gone Nvidia twice for 6600GT and 9800GT but now I am using a GTX 980. Not a single mid-range/high-end card in AMD/ATI's line up is correctly priced. Lower price by 15-20% to take into account the power usage, poor driver and less features will make them more competitivejust4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
At the high end you "may" have a point.. but what is the 960 bringing to the table against the 380? Not much.. not much at all. How about the 970 vs the 390? Again.. not much.. and in crossfire/sli situations the 390 (in theory..) should be one helluva bang for the buck 4k setup.There will be a market for the FuryX.. and considering the efforts they put into it I don't believe it's going to get the 15-20% price drop your hoping for.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Slightly better performance while pulling less power and putting out less heat, and in the 970's case, is currently about $10 cheaper. Given that crossfire is less reliable than SLI, why WOULD you buy an AMD card?Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Maybe because people want decent performance above 3.5 GB of VRAM? Or they don't appreciate bait and switch, being lied to (ROP count, VRAM speed, nothing about the partitioning in the specs, cache size).medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Freesync?Built-in water cooling?
Disgust for nVidia's shitty buisness practices?
A brain?
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
How do you feel about the business practice of sending out a card with faults that you claimed were fixed?Or claims that you had the world's fastest GPU enabled by HBM?
Or claims/benches that your card was faster than 980Ti?
Or claims that your card was an Overclocker's Dream when it is anything but that and OCs 10% max?
A brain right? :)
sa365 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
How do you feel about the business practice of sending out a card with faulty, cheating drivers that lower IQ despite what you set in game so you can win/cheat in those said benchmarks. It's supposed to be apples to apples not apples to mandarins?How about we wait until unwinder writes the software for voltage unlocks before we test overclocking, those darn fruits again huh?
Nvidia will cheat their way through anything it seems.
It's pretty damning when you look at screens side by side, no AF Nvidia.
Margalus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
freesync? not as good as gsync and is still not free. It takes similar hardware added to the monitor just like gsync.built in water cooling? just something else to go wrong and be more expensive to repair, with the possibility of it ruining other computer components.
Disgust for NVidia's shitty business practices? what are those? Do you mean like not giving review samples of your cards to honest review sites because they told the truth about their cards so now you are afraid that they will tell the truth about your newest pos? Sounds like you should really hate AMD's shitty business practices.