The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect of current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
With Shadow of Mordor things finally start looking up for AMD, as the R9 Fury X scores its first win. Okay, it’s more of a tie than a win, but it’s farther than the R9 Fury X has made it so far.
At 4K with Ultra settings the R9 Fury X manages an average of 48.3fps, a virtual tie with the GTX 980 Ti and its 47.9fps. Dropping down to Very High quality does see AMD pull back just a bit, but with a difference between the two cards of just 0.7fps, it’s hardly worth worrying about. Even 2560 looks good for AMD here, trailing the GTX 980 Ti by just over 1fps, at an average framerate of over 80fps. Overall the R9 Fury X delivers 98% to 101% of the performance of the GTX 980 Ti, more or less tying the direct competitor to AMD’s latest card.
Meanwhile compared to the R9 290X, the R9 Fury X doesn’t see quite the same gains. Performance is a fairly consistent 26-28% ahead of the R9 290X, less than what we’ve seen elsewhere. Earlier we discussed how the R9 Fury X’s performance gains will depend on which part of the GPU is getting stressed the most; tasks that stress the shaders show the most gains, and tasks that stress geometry or the ROPs potentially show the lowest gains. In the case of SoM, I believe we’re seeing at least a partial case of being geometry/ROP influenced.
Unfortunately for AMD, the minimum framerate situation isn’t quite as good as the averages. These framerates aren’t bad – the R9 Fury X is always over 30fps – but even accounting for the higher variability of minimum framerates, they’re trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 13-15% with Ultra quality settings. Interestingly at 4K with Very High quality settings the minimum framerate gap is just 3%, in which case what we are most likely seeing is the impact of running Ultra settings with only 4GB of VRAM. The 4GB cards don’t get punished too much for it, but for R9 Fury X and its 4GB of HBM, it is beginning to crack under the pressure of what is admittedly one of our more VRAM-demanding games.
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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?