The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTCompute
Shifting gears, we have our look at compute performance. As an FP64 card, the R9 Fury X only offers the bare minimum FP64 performance for a GCN product, so we won’t see anything great here. On the other hand with a theoretical FP32 performance of 8.6 TFLOPs, AMD could really clean house on our more regular FP32 workloads.
Starting us off for our look at compute is LuxMark3.0, the latest version of the official benchmark of LuxRender 2.0. LuxRender’s GPU-accelerated rendering mode is an OpenCL based ray tracer that forms a part of the larger LuxRender suite. Ray tracing has become a stronghold for GPUs in recent years as ray tracing maps well to GPU pipelines, allowing artists to render scenes much more quickly than with CPUs alone.
The results with LuxMark ended up being quite a bit of a surprise, and not for a good reason. Compute workloads are shader workloads, and these are workloads that should best illustrate the performance improvements of R9 Fury X over R9 290X. And yet while the R9 Fury X is the fastest single GPU AMD card, it’s only some 16% faster, a far cry from the 50%+ that it should be able to attain.
Right now I have no reason to doubt that the R9 Fury X is capable of utilizing all of its shaders. It just can’t do so very well with LuxMark. Given the fact that the R9 Fury X is first and foremost a gaming card, and OpenCL 1.x traction continues to be low, I am wondering whether we’re seeing a lack of OpenCL driver optimizations for Fiji.
For our second set of compute benchmarks we have CompuBench 1.5, the successor to CLBenchmark. CompuBench offers a wide array of different practical compute workloads, and we’ve decided to focus on face detection, optical flow modeling, and particle simulations.
Quickly taking some of the air out of our driver theory, the R9 Fury X’s performance on CompuBench is quite a bit better, and much closer to what we’d expect given the hardware of the R9 Fury X. The Fury X only wins overall at Optical Flow, a somewhat memory-bandwidth heavy test that to no surprise favors AMD’s HBM additions, but otherwise the performance gains across all of these tests are 40-50%. Overall then the outcome over who wins is heavily test dependent, though this is nothing new.
Our 3rd compute benchmark is Sony Vegas Pro 13, an OpenGL and OpenCL video editing and authoring package. Vegas can use GPUs in a few different ways, the primary uses being to accelerate the video effects and compositing process itself, and in the video encoding step. With video encoding being increasingly offloaded to dedicated DSPs these days we’re focusing on the editing and compositing process, rendering to a low CPU overhead format (XDCAM EX). This specific test comes from Sony, and measures how long it takes to render a video.
At this point Vegas is becoming increasingly CPU-bound and will be due for replacement. The Fury X none the less shaves off an additional second of rendering time, bringing it down to 21 seconds.
Moving on, our 4th compute benchmark is FAHBench, the official Folding @ Home benchmark. Folding @ Home is the popular Stanford-backed research and distributed computing initiative that has work distributed to millions of volunteer computers over the internet, each of which is responsible for a tiny slice of a protein folding simulation. FAHBench can test both single precision and double precision floating point performance, with single precision being the most useful metric for most consumer cards due to their low double precision performance. Each precision has two modes, explicit and implicit, the difference being whether water atoms are included in the simulation, which adds quite a bit of work and overhead. This is another OpenCL test, utilizing the OpenCL path for FAHCore 17.
Both of the FP32 tests for FAHBench show smaller than expected performance gains given the fact that the R9 Fury X has such a significant increase in compute resources and memory bandwidth. 25% and 34% respectively are still decent gains, but they’re smaller gains than anything we saw on CompuBench. This does lend a bit more support to our theory about driver optimizations, though FAHBench has not always scaled well with compute resources to begin with.
Meanwhile FP64 performance dives as expected. With a 1/16 rate it’s not nearly as bad as the GTX 900 series, but even the Radeon HD 7970 is beating the R9 Fury X here.
Wrapping things up, our final compute benchmark is an in-house project developed by our very own Dr. Ian Cutress. SystemCompute is our first C++ AMP benchmark, utilizing Microsoft’s simple C++ extensions to allow the easy use of GPU computing in C++ programs. SystemCompute in turn is a collection of benchmarks for several different fundamental compute algorithms, with the final score represented in points. DirectCompute is the compute backend for C++ AMP on Windows, so this forms our other DirectCompute test.
Our C++ AMP benchmark is another case of decent, though not amazing, GPU compute performance gains. The R9 Fury X picks up 35% over the R9 290X. And in fact this is enough to vault it over NVIDIA’s cards to retake the top spot here, though not by a great amount.
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anandreader106 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
@Wreckage Not quite. Cash reserves play a role in evaluating a company's net worth. When AMD acquired ATI, they spent considerable money to do so and plunged themselves into debt. The resulting valuation of AMD was not simply the combined valuations of AMD and ATI pre-acquisition. Far from it.AMD is the undisputed underdog in 2015, and has been for many years before that. That is why Ryan gave so much praise to AMD in the article. For them to even be competitive at the high end, given their resources and competition, is nothing short of impressive.
If you cannot at least acknowledge that, than your view on this product and the GPU market is completely warped. As consumers we are all better off with a Fury X in the market.
Yojimbo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Yes, NVIDIA was definitely the underdog at the time of the AMD purchase of ATI. Many people were leaving NVIDIA for dead. NVIDIA had recently lost its ability to make chipsets for Intel processors, and after AMD bought ATI it was presumed (rightly so) that NVIDIA would no longer be able to make chipsets for AMD processors. It was thought that the discrete GPU market might dry up with fusion CPU/GPU chips taking over the market.chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Yep, I remember after the merger happened most AMD/ATI fans were rejoicing as they felt it would spell the end of both Nvidia and Intel, Future is Fusion and all that promise lol. Many like myself were pointing out the fact AMD overpayed for ATI and that they would collapse under the weight of all that debt given ATI's revenue and profits didn't come close to justifying the purchase price.My how things have played out completely differently! It's like the incredible shrinking company. At this point it really is in AMD and their fan's best interest if they are just bought out and broken up for scraps, at least someone with deep pockets might be able to revive some of their core products and turn things around.
Ranger101 - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Well done Mr Smith. I would go so far as to say THE best Fury X review on the internet barnone. The most important ingredient is BALANCE. Something that other reviews sorely lack.
In particular the PCPer and HardOCP articles read like they were written by the green
goblin himself and consequently suffer a MASSIVE credibility failure.
Yes Nvidia has a better performing card in the 980TI but it was refreshing to see credit
given to AMD where it was due. Only dolts and fanatical AMD haters (I'm not quite sure
what category chizow falls into, probably both and a third "Nvidia shill") would deny that
we need AMD AND Nvidia for the consumer to win.
Thanks Anandtech.
Michael Bay - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Except chizow never stated he wishes to see AMD dead.I guess it`s your butthurt talking.
chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Yep, just AMD fanboys ;)"What's Left of AMD" can keep making SoCs and console APUs or whatever other widgets under the umbrella of some monster conglomerate like Samsung, Qualcomm or Microsoft and I'm perfectly OK with that. Maybe I'll even buy an AMD product again.
medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
"AMD going away won't matter to anyone but their few remaining devout fanboys'So kind (paid?) nVidia troll chizow is.
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
@medi03 no worries I look forward to the day (unpaid?) AMD fantroll's like you can free yourselves from the mediocrity that is AMD.chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Yet, still 3rd rate. The overwhelming majority of the market has gone on just fine without AMD being relevant in the CPU market, and recently, the same has happened in the GPU market. AMD going away won't matter to anyone but their few remaining devout fanboys like Ranger101.piiman - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
"AMD going away won't matter to anyone but their few remaining devout fanboys'Hmmm you'll think different when GPU prices go up up up. Competition is good for consumers and without it you will pay more, literally.