The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTTotal War: Attila
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Attila is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a large area with a fortress in the middle, making it a good GPU stress test.
Attila is the third win in a row for AMD at 4K. Here the R9 Fury X beats the GTX 980 Ti by 5% at the Max quality setting. However as this benchmark is very forward looking (read: ridiculously GPU intensive), the actual performance at 4K Max isn’t very good. No single GPU card can average 30fps here, and framerates will easily dip below 20fps. Since this is a strategy game we don’t have the same high bar for performance requirements, but sub-30fps still won’t cut it.
In which case we have to either compromise on quality or resolution, and in either case AMD’s lead dissolves. At 4K Quality and 1440p Max, the R9 Fury X trails the GTX 980 Ti by 8% and 3% respectively. And actually the 1440p results are still a good showing, but given AMD’s push for 4K, to lose to the GTX 980 Ti by more at the resolution they favor is a bit embarrassing.
Meanwhile, Atilla has always seemed to love pushing shaders more than anything else, so it comes as no great surprise that this game is a strong showing for the R9 Fury X relative to its predecessor. The performance gains at 4K are a consistent 52%, right at the top-end of our performance expectation window, and a bit smaller (but still impressive) 43% at 1440p.
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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...