The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTThe State of Mantle, The Drivers, & The Test
Before diving into our long-awaited benchmark results, I wanted to quickly touch upon the state of Mantle now that AMD has given us a bit more insight into what’s going on.
With the Vulkan project having inherited and extended Mantle, Mantle’s external development is at an end for AMD. AMD has already told us in the past that they are essentially taking it back inside, and will be using it as a platform for testing future API developments. Externally then AMD has now thrown all of their weight behind Vulkan and DirectX 12, telling developers that future games should use those APIs and not Mantle.
In the meantime there is the question of what happens to existing Mantle games. So far there are about half a dozen games that support the API, and for these games Mantle is the only low-level API available to them. Should Mantle disappear, then these games would no longer be able to render at such a low-level.
The situation then is that in discussing the performance results of the R9 Fury X with Mantle, AMD has confirmed that while they are not outright dropping Mantle support, they have ceased all further Mantle optimization. Of particular note, the Mantle driver has not been optimized at all for GCN 1.2, which includes not just R9 Fury X, but R9 285, R9 380, and the Carrizo APU as well. Mantle titles will probably still work on these products – and for the record we can’t get Civilization: Beyond Earth to play nicely with the R9 285 via Mantle – but performance is another matter. Mantle is essentially deprecated at this point, and while AMD isn’t going out of their way to break backwards compatibility they aren’t going to put resources into helping it either. The experiment that is Mantle has come to an end.
This will in turn impact our testing somewhat. For our 2015 benchmark suite we began using low-level APIs when available, which in the current game suite includes Battlefield 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Civilization: Beyond Earth, not counting on AMD to cease optimizing Mantle quite so soon. As a result we’re in the uncomfortable position of having to backtrack on our policies some in order to not base our recommendations on stupid settings.
Starting with this review we’re going to use low-level APIs when available, and when using them makes performance sense. That means we’re not going to use Mantle in the cases where performance has clearly regressed due to a lack of optimizations, but will use it for games where it still works as expected (which essentially comes down to Civ: BE). Ultimately everything will move to Vulkan and DirectX 12, but in the meantime we will need to be more selective about where we use Mantle.
The Drivers
For the launch of the 300/Fury series, AMD has taken an unexpected direction with their drivers. The launch driver for these parts is the Catalyst 15.15 driver, AMD’s next major driver branch which includes everything from Fiji support to WDDM 2.0 support. However in launching these parts, AMD has bifurcated their drivers; the new cards get Catalyst 15.15, the old cards get Catalyst 15.6 (driver version 14.502).
Eventually AMD will bring these cards back together in a later driver release, after they have done more extensive QA against their older cards. In the meantime it’s possible to use a modified version of Catalyst 15.15 to enable support for some of these older cards, but unsigned drivers and Windows do not get along well, and it introduces other potential issues. Otherwise considering that these new drivers do include performance improvements for existing cards, we are not especially happy with the current situation. Existing Radeon owners are essentially having performance held back from them, if only temporarily. Small tomes could be written on AMD’s driver situation – they clearly don’t have the resources to do everything they’d like to at once – but this is perhaps the most difficult situation they’ve put Radeon owners in yet.
The Test
Finally, let’s talk testing. For our benchmarking we have used AMD’s Catalyst 15.15 beta drivers for the R9 Fury X, and their Catalyst 15.5 beta drivers for all other AMD cards. Meanwhile for NVIDIA cards we are on release 352.90.
From a build standpoint we’d like to remind everyone that installing a GPU radiator in our closed cased test bed does require reconfiguring the test bed slightly; a 120mm rear exhaust fan must be removed to make room for the GPU radiator.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 Fury X AMD Radeon R9 295X2 AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 285 AMD Radeon HD 7970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 352.90 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.5 Beta (All Other AMD Cards) AMD Catalyst Cat 15.15 Beta (R9 Fury X) |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
@piiman - I guess we'll see soon enough, I'm confident it won't make any difference given GPU prices have gone up and up anyways. If anything we may see price stabilization as we've seen in the CPU industry.medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
Another portion of bulshit from nVidia troll.AMD never ever had more than 25% of CPU share. Doom to Intel, my ass.
Even in Prescott times Intell was selling more CPUs and for higher price.
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
@medi03 AMD was up to 30% a few times and they did certainly have performance leadership at the time of K8 but of course they wanted to charge anyone for the privilege. Higher price? No, $450 for entry level Athlon 64, much more than what they charged in the past and certainly much more than Intel was charging at the time going up to $1500 on the high end with their FX chips.Samus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Best interest? Broken up for scraps? You do realize how important AMD is to people who are Intel\NVidia fans right?Without AMD, Intel and NVidia are unchallenged, and we'll be back to paying $250 for a low-end video card and $300 for a mid-range CPU. There would be no GTX 750's or Pentium G3258's in the <$100 tier.
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
@Samus, they're irrelevant in the CPU market and have been for years, and yet amazingly, prices are as low as ever since Intel began dominating AMD in performance when they launched Core 2. Since then I've upgraded 5x and have not paid more than $300 for a high-end Intel CPU. How does this happen without competition from AMD as you claim? Oh right, because Intel is still competing with itself and needs to provide enough improvement in order to entice me to buy another one of their products and "upgrade".The exact same thing will happen in the GPU sector, with or without AMD. Not worried at all, in fact I'm looking forward to the day a company with deep pockets buys out AMD and reinvigorates their products, I may actually have a reason to buy AMD (or whatever it is called after being bought out) again!
Iketh - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
you overestimate the human drive... if another isn't pushing us, we will get lazy and that's not an argument... what we'll do instead to make people upgrade is release products in steps planned out much further into the future that are even smaller steps than how intel is releasing nowsilverblue - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
I think this chart shows a better view of who was the underdog and when:http://i59.tinypic.com/5uk3e9.jpg
ATi were ahead for the 9xxx series, and that's it. Moreover, NVIDIA's chipset struggles with Intel were in 2009 and settled in early 2011, something that would've benefitted NVIDIA far more than Intel's settlement with AMD as it would've done far less damage to NVIDIA's financials over a much shorter period of time.
The lack of higher end APUs hasn't helped, nor has the issue with actually trying to get a GPU onto a CPU die in the first place. Remember that when Intel tried it with Clarkdale/Arrandale, the graphics and IMC were 45nm, sitting alongside everything else which was 32nm.
chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
I think you have to look at a bigger sample than that, riding on the 9000 series momentum, AMD was competitive for years with a near 50/50 share through the X800/X1900 series. And then G80/R600 happened and they never really recovered. There was a minor blip with Cypress vs. Fermi where AMD got close again but Nvidia quickly righted things with GF106 and GF110 (GTX 570/580).Scali - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
nVidia wasn't the underdog in terms of technology. nVidia was the choice of gamers. ATi was big because they had been around since the early days of CGA and Hercules, and had lots of OEM contracts.In terms of technology and performance, ATi was always struggling to keep up with nVidia, and they didn't reach parity until the Radeon 8500/9700-era, even though nVidia was the newcomer and ATi had been active in the PC market since the mid-80s.
Frenetic Pony - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Well done analysis, though the kick in the head was Bulldozer and it's utter failure. Core 2 wasn't really AMD's downfall so much as Core/Sandy Bridge, which came at the exact wrong time for the utter failure of Bulldozer. This combined with AMD's dismal failure to market its graphics card has cost them billions. Even this article calls the 290x problematic, a card that offered the same performance as the original Titan at a fraction of the price. Based on empirical data the 290/x should have been almost continuously sold until the introduction of Nvidia's Maxwell architecture.Instead people continued to buy the much less performant per dollar Nvidia cards and/or waited for "the good GPU company" to put out their new architecture. AMD's performance in marketing has been utterly appalling at the same time Nvidia's has been extremely tight. Whether that will, or even can, change next year remains to be seen.