The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds the “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.
A pure and strenuous DirectX 11 test, Crysis 3 in this case is a pretty decent bellwether for the overall state of the R9 Fury X. Once again the card trails the GTX 980 Ti, but not by quite as much as we saw in Battlefield 4. In this case the gap is 6-7% at 4K, and 12% at 1440p, not too far off of 4% and 10% respectively. This test hits the shaders pretty hard, so of our tried and true benchmarks I was expecting this to be one of the better games for AMD, so the results in a sense do end up as surprising.
In any case, on an absolute basis this is also a good example of the 4K quality tradeoff. R9 Fury X is fast enough to deliver 1440p at high quality settings over 60fps, or 4K with reduced quality settings over 60fps. Otherwise if you want 4K with high quality settings, the performance hit means a framerate average in just the 30s.
Otherwise the gains over the R9 290XU are quite good. The R9 Fury X picks up 38-40% at 4K, and 36% at 1440p. This trends relatively close to our 40% expectations for the card, reinforcing just how big of a leap the card is for AMD.
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OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - link
Anti-aliasing is required for the same reason that no AA still sticks out on 3D titles on an iPad, but in my experience with a 32-inch 4K Asus, post-process AA (SMAA, FXAA) does the job just fine.Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
"the OS uses 3 GB to 3.5 GB"That's insane bloat.
Nerdsinc - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
I sincerely hope the Overclocking limitations are related to software, a $1000 card with liquid cooling ought to be able to pull higher clocks than that...yhselp - Saturday, July 18, 2015 - link
Out of curiosity, is it really possible for an Xbox One/PlayStation 4 game to take up over 4GB of memory just for graphics, since just 5GB total are usable for games?Refuge - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
When ported to PC yes. That is because we usualyl get enhanced graphics settings that they do not.PC ports are also less efficient because of low budget ports. Which just compounds the issue more.
Computers have to be more powerful than their console counter parts in order to play equivalent games due to sloppy coding, and enhanced visual options.
ludikraut - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Lack of HDMI 2.0 support totally kills the card for me. Who the heck wants to look at 4K at 30Hz? Guess I'll be sticking with my GTX 970 for a while.l8r)
eodeot - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
You didn't even mention AMDs poor power consumption while idle with multiple monitors or while playing back a video of any kind.For some reason AMD thinks that playing back 240p Youtube video requires 3d clocks and thus 3d power consumption, even if the video is paused.
AMD failed to address it for the past 5 years and you failed to mention it yet again. Nvidia fixed this long ago...
JJofLegend - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link
I recently got an AMD Fury X, but I'm running into an issue with my games. I've tried with Battlefield 4, Crisis 3, Quantum Break, ReCore, The Division, and they all have the same distortion. Any ideas or anyone that can make suggestions? I don't know how to trouble shoot this.Here is a screenshot of Crisis 3:
https://vjkc5g-ch3301.files.1drv.com/y3m_mcTTTddOj...