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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bennyg - Saturday, July 4, 2015 - link
Marketing performance. Exactly.Except efficiency was not good enough across the generations of 28nm GCN in an era where efficiency + thermal/power limits constrain performance, and look what Nvidia did over a similar era from Fermi (which was at market when GCN 1.0 was released) to Kepler to Maxwell. Plus efficiency is kind of the ultimate marketing buzzword in all areas of tech and not having any ability to mention it (plus having generally inferor products) hamstrung their marketing all along
xenol - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Efficiency is important because of three things:1. If your TDP is through the rough, you'll have issues with your cooling setup. Any time you introduce a bigger cooling setup because your cards run that hot, you're going to be mocked for it and people are going to be weary of it. With 22nm or 20nm nowhere in sight for GPUs, efficiency had to be a priority, otherwise you're going to ship cards that take up three slots or ship with water coolers.
2. You also can't just play to the desktop market. Laptops are still the preferred computing platform and even if people are going for a desktop, AIOs are looking much more appealing than a monitor/tower combo. So you want to have any shot in either market, you have to build an efficient chip. And you have to convince people they "need" this chip, because Intel's iGPUs do what most people want just fine anyway.
3. Businesses and such with "always on" computers would like it if their computers ate less power. Even if you can save a handful of watts, multiplying that by thousands and they add up to an appreciable amount of savings.
xenol - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
(Also by "computing platform" I mean the platform people choose when they want a computer)medi03 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
ATI is the reason both Microsoft and Sony use AMDs APUs to power their consoles.It might be the reason why APUs even exist.
tipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
That was then, this is now. Now, AMD together with the acquisition, has a lower market cap than Nvidia.Murloc - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
yeah, no.ddriver - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
ATI wasn't bigger, AMD just paid a preposterous and entirely unrealistic amount of money for it. Soon after the merger, AMD + ATI was worth less than what they paid for the latter, ultimately leading to the loss of its foundries, putting it in an even worse position. Let's face it, AMD was, and historically has always been betrayed, its sole purpose is to create the illusion of competition so that the big boys don't look bad for running unopposed, even if this is what happens in practice.Just when AMD got lucky with Athlon a mole was sent to make sure AMD stays down.
testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
foundries didn't go because AMD bought ATI. That might have accelerated it by a few years however.Foundry issue and cost to AMD dates back to the 1990's and 2000-2001.
5150Joker - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
True, AMD was at a much better position in 2006 vs NVIDIA, they just got owned.3DVagabond - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
When was Intel the underdog? Because that's who's knocked them down (The aren't out yet.).