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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Scali - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Even better, there are various vendors that sell a short version of the GTX970 (including Asus and Gigabyte for example), so it can take on the Nano card directly, as a good choice for a mini-ITX based HTPC.And unlike the Nano, the 970 DOES have HDMI 2.0, so you can get 4k 60 Hz on your TV.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
28 GB/s + XOR contention is fast performance indeed, at half the speed of a midrange card from 2007.Gothmoth - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
so in short another BULLDOZER.... :-(after all the hype not enough and too late.
i agree the card is not bad.. but after all the HYPE it IS a disappointment.
OC results are terrible... and AMD said it will be an overclockers dream.
add to that that i read many complains about the noisy watercooler (yes for retail versions not early preview versions).
iamserious - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
It looks ugly. Loliamserious - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Also. I understand it's a little early but I thought this card was supposed to blow the GTX 980Ti out of the water with it's new memory. The performance to price ratio is decent but I was expecting a bit larger jump in performance increase. Perhaps with the driver updates things will change.Scali - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Hum, unless I missed it, I didn't see any mention of the fact that this card only supports DX12 level 12_0, where nVidia's 9xx-series support 12_1.That, combined with the lack of HDMI 2.0 and the 4 GB limit, makes the Fury X into a poor choice for the longer term. It is a dated architecture, pumped up to higher performance levels.
FMinus - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Whilst it's beyond me why they skimped on HDMI 2.0 - there's adapters if you really want to run this card on a TV. It's not such a huge drama tho, the cards will drive DP monitors in the vast majority, so, I'm much more sad at the missing DVI out.Scali - Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - link
I think the reason why there's no HDMI 2.0 is simple: they re-used their dated architecture, and did not spend time on developing new features, such as HDMI 2.0 or 12_1 support.With nVidia already having this technology on the market for more than half a year, AMD is starting to drop behind. They were losing sales to nVidia, and their new offerings don't seem compelling enough to regain their lost marketshare, hence their profits will be limited, hence their investment in R&D for the next generation will be limited. Which is a problem, since they need to invest more just to get where nVidia already is.
It looks like they may be going down the same downward spiral as their CPU division.
sa365 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Well at least AMD aren't cheating by allowing the driver to remove AF despite what settings are selected in game. Just so they can win benchmarks.How about some fair, like for like benchmarking and see where these cards really stand.
FourEyedGeek - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
As for the consoles having 8 GB of RAM, not only is that shared, but the OS uses 3 GB to 3.5 GB, meaning there is only a max of 5 GB for the games on those consoles. A typical PC being used with this card will have 8 to 16 GB plus the 4 GB on the card. Giving a total of 12 GB to 20 GB.In all honesty at 4K resolutions, how important is Anti-Aliasing on the eye? I can't imagine it being necessary at all, let alone 4xMSAA.