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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TallestJon96 - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
This card is not the disappointment people make it out to be. One month ago this card would have been a MASSIVE success. What is strange to me is that they didn't reduce price, even slightly to compete with the new 980 ti. I suspect it was to avoid a price war, but I would say at $600 this card is attractive, but at $650 you only really want it for water cooling. I suspect the price will drop more quickly than the 980 ti.mccoy3 - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
So it is as expensive as the 980Ti by delivering less performance and requires watercooling. Once Nvidia settles for a TITAN Y including HBM, its all over for the red guys.just4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Well that would be great news for AMD though wouldn't it since Nvidia would have to pay for the use of HBM in some form or another..Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
AMD could have released a hot leaf blower like the GTX 480 and chose not to.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
No, they couldn't have. Fury X is already a 275W and that's with the benefit of low temp leakage using a WC *AND* the benefit of a self-professed 15-20W TDP surplus from HBM. That means in order for Fury X to still fall 10% short of 980Ti, it is already using 25+20W, so 45W more power.Their CUSTOM cooled 7/8th cut Fury is going to be 275W typical board power as well and its cut down, so yeah the difference in functional unit power is most likely going to be the same as the difference in thermal leakage due to operating temperatures between water and custom air cooling. A hot leaf blower, especially one as poor as AMD's reference would only be able to cool a 6/8 cut Fiji or lower, but at that point you might as well get a Hawaii based card.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Your posts don't even try to sound sane. I wrote about the GTX 480, which was designed to run hot and loud. Nvidia also couldn't release a fully-enabled chip.Ignore the point about the low-grade cooler on the 480 which ran hot and was very loud.
Ignore the point about the card being set to run hot, which hurt performance per watt (see this article if you don't get it).
How much is Nvidia paying you to astroturf? Whatever it is, it's too much.
Margalus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
this AMD card pumps out more heat than any NVidia card. Just because it runs a tad cooler with water cooling doesn't mean the heat is not there. It's just removed faster with water cooling, but the heat is still generated and the card will blow out a lot more hot air into the room than any NVidia card.Oxford Guy - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
If you can't afford AC then stick with something like a 750 Ti. Otherwise the extra heat is hardly a big deal.zodiacfml - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
My excitement with HBM has subsided as I realized that this is too costly to be implemented in AMD's APUs even next year. Yet, I hope they do as soon as possible even if it would mean HBM on a narrower bus.jburns - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Probably the best graphics card review I've ever read! Detailed and balanced... Thanks Ryan for an excellent review.