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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
458 Comments
View All Comments
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.