The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
As we briefly mentioned in our testing notes, our Battlefield 4 testing has been slightly modified as of this review to accommodate the changes in how AMD is supporting Mantle. This benchmark still defaults to Mantle for GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 cards (7970, 290X), but we’re using Direct3D for GCN 1.2 cards like the R9 Fury X. This is due to the lack of Mantle driver optimizations on AMD’s part, and as a result the R9 Fury X sees poorer performance here, especially at 2560x1440 (65.2fps vs. 54.3fps).
In any case, regardless of the renderer you pick, our first test does not go especially well for AMD and the R9 Fury X. The R9 Fury X does not take the lead at any resolution, and in fact this is one of the worse games for the card. At 4K AMD trails by 8-10%, and at 1440p that’s 16%. In fact the latter is closer to the GTX 980 than it is the GTX 980 Ti. Even with the significant performance improvement from the R9 Fury X, it’s not enough to catch up to NVIDIA here.
Meanwhile the performance improvement over the R9 290X “Uber” stands at between 23% and 32% depending on the resolution. AMD not only scales better than NVIDIA with higher resolutions, but R9 Fury X is scaling better than R9 290X as well.
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just4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
I thought it was great as well.. It had a lot more meat to it then I was expecting. Ryan might have been late to the party but he's getting more feedback than most other sites on his review so that shows that it was highly anticipated.B3an - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
I don't understand why the Fury X doesn't perform better... It's specs are considerably better than a 290X/390X and it's memory bandwidth is far higher than any other card out there... yet it still can't beat the 980 Ti and should also be faster than it already is compared to the 290X. It just doesn't make sense.just4U - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Early drivers and perhaps the change over into a new form of memory tech has a bit of a tech curve that isn't fully realized yet.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Perhaps DX11 is holding it back. As far as I understand it, Maxwell is more optimized for DX11 than AMD's cards are. AMD really should have sponsored a game engine or something so that there would have been a DX12 title available for benchmarkers with this card's launch.dominopourous - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great stuff. Can we get a benchmarks with these cards overclocked? I'm thinking the 980 Ti and the Titan X will scale much better with overclocking compared to Fury X.Mark_gb - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Great review. With 1 exception.Once again, the 400 AMP number is tossed around as how much power the Fury X can handle. But think about that for one second. Even a EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 G2 Power Supply is extreme overkill for a system with a single Fury X in it, and its +12V rail only provides 133.3 amps.
That 400 AMP number is wrong. Very wrong. It should be 400 watts. Push 400 Amps into a Fury X and it most likely would literally explode. I would not want to be anywhere near that event.
AngelOfTheAbyss - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
The operating voltage of the Fury chip is probably around 1V, so 400A sounds correct (1V*400A = 400W).meacupla - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
okay, see, it's not 12V * 400A = 4800W. It's 1V (or around 1V) * 400A = 400W4800W would trip most 115VAC circuit breakers, as that would be 41A on 115VAC, before you even start accounting for conversion losses.
bugsy1339 - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Anyone hear about Nvidia lowering thier graphics quality to get a higher frame rate in reviews vs Fury? Reference is semi accurate forum 7/3 (Nvidia reduces IQ to boost performance on 980TI? )sa365 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
I too would like to know more re:bugsy1939 comment.Have Nvidia been caught out with lower IQ levels forced in the driver?