The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTGRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layed with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Unfortunately for AMD, after a streak of wins and ties for AMD, things start going off the rails with GRID, very off the rails.
At 4K Ultra this is AMD’s single biggest 4K performance deficit; the card trails the GTX 980 Ti by 14%. The good news is that in the process the card cracks 60fps, so framerates are solid on an absolute basis, though there are still going to be some frames below 60fps for racing purists to contend with.
Where things get really bad is at 1440p, in a situation we have never seen before in a high-end AMD video card review. The R9 Fury X gets pummeled here, trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 30%, and even falling behind the GTX 980 and GTX 780 Ti. The reason it’s getting pummeled is because the R9 Fury X is CPU bottlenecked here; no matter what resolution we pick, the R9 Fury X can’t spit out more than about 82fps here at Ultra quality.
With GPU performance outgrowing CPU performance year after year, this is something that was due to happen sooner or later, and is a big reason that low-level APIs are about to come into the fold. And if it was going to happen anywhere, it would happen with a flagship level video card. Still, with an overclocked Core i7-4960X driving our testbed, this is also one of the most powerful systems available with respect to CPU performance, so AMD’s drivers are burning an incredible amount of CPU time here.
Ultimately GRID serves to cement our concerns about AMD’s performance at 1440p, as it’s very possible that this is the tip of the iceberg. DirectX 11 will go away eventually, but it will still take some time. In the meantime there are a number of 1440p gamers out there, especially with R9 Fury X otherwise being such a good fit for high frame rate 1440p gaming. Perhaps the biggest issue here is that this makes it very hard to justify pairing 1440p 144Hz monitors with AMD’s GPUs, as although 82.6fps is fine for a 60Hz monitor, these CPU issues are making it hard for AMD to deliver framerates more suitable/desirable for those high performance monitors.
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UltraWide - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
What took so long? :)Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
I was out of commission for a week with a nasty cold (which I likely picked up from the AMD trip).CajunArson - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"(which I likely picked up from the AMD trip)."It seems AMD has stooped to using biological warfare!
chizow - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Hope you are feeling betterRanger101 - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Here we go, Chizoo once again attempting to align himself with the reviewer, as he does at PCPER no doubt attempting to gain much needed credibility. I'm afraid it's too late bro as you are universally recognised as a psychotic AMD hater. But feigning concern for the reviewer's health is a laughable cheap shot, even by your bottom feeding standards.Michael Bay - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Boy, is your behind in flames!chizow - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
lmfao, yeah, wishing someone who was sick well is now some covert attempt to woo favors towards my sekret Nvidia agenda.You're an idiot, delete your account from the internet and quietly wait in the corner with your tinfoil dunce cap until AMD implodes, thanks.
Ranger101 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Good to see you charging in to defend Chizoo there Michael, he does need help. The point is, dearest Chizoo, You can't on the one hand @ PCPER claim that Ryan Smith conveniently got sick to avoid raining on the fury like other websites and then pretend that you are concerned about his health @ Anandtech. It's too late for damage control bro, people are now well aware of your mentality or lack thereof.Wreckage - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
The irony of getting a cold from AMDsaru44 - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
lol :D