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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chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
While Intel wasn't the underdog in terms of marketshare, they were in terms of technology and performance with the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium 4. Intel had a dog on their hands that they managed to weather the storm with, until they got Conroe'd in 2006. Now, they are down and most likely out, as Zen even if it delivers as promised (40% IPC increase just isn't enough) will take years to gain traction in the CPU market. Time AMD simply does not have, especially given how far behind they've fallen in the dGPU market.nikaldro - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
That's 40% over excavator, so about 60%? over vishera.If they manage to get good enough IPC on 8 cores, at a good price, they may really make a comeback
chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Well, best of luck with this. :)bgo - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Well during the P4 era Intel bribed OEMs to not use Athlon chips, which they later had to pay $1.25bn to AMD for. While one could argue the monetary losses may have been partially made up for, the settlement came at the end of 2009, so too little too late. Intel bought themselves time with their bribes, and that's what really enabled them to weather the storms.chizow - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
No, if you read the actual results and AMD's own testimony, they couldn't produce enough chips and offer them at a low enough price to OEMs compared to what Intel was just giving away as subsidies.piiman - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
" AMD got beat by the underdog. "And that makes them the underdog now.
boozed - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Mantle is essentially depreciated at this point"Deprecated, surely?
chrisgon - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Which is not say I’m looking to paint a poor picture of the company – AMD Is nothing if not the perineal underdog who constantly manages to surprise us with what they can do with less"I think the word you were looking for is perennial. Unless you truly meant to refer to AMD as the taint.
ArKritz - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
I think there's about a 50-50 chance of that...ingwe - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the effort that went into this article. I hope you are feeling better.In general this article makes me continue to feel sad for AMD.