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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Navvie - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
"Which is not say I’m looking" (paragraph 5, first line).Missing a "to" I think.
watzupken - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Brilliant review. Well worth the wait. Thanks Ryan.Taracta - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
ROPs, ROPs, ROPs! Hows can they ~ double everything else and keep the same amount of ROPs and expect to win?Thatguy97 - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
maybe something to do with cost or yieldtipoo - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
They literally hit the size limits interposers can scale up to with this chip - so they can't make it any bigger to pack more transistors for more ROPs, until a die shrink. So they decided on a tradeoff, favouring other things than ROPs.Kevin G - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
They had a monster shader count and likely would be fine if they went to 3840 max to make room for more ROPs. 96 or 128 ROPs would have been impressive and really made this chip push lots of pixels. With HBM and the new delta color compression algorithm, there should be enough bandwidth to support these additional ROPs without bottle necking them.AMD also scaled the number of TMUs with the shaders but it likely wouldn't have hurt to have increased them by 50% too. Alternatively AMD could have redesigned the TMUs to have better 16 bit per channel texture support. Either of these changes would have put the texel throughput well beyond the GM200's theoretical throughput. I have a feeling that this is one of the bottlenecks that helps the GM200 pull ahead of Fiji.
tipoo - Friday, July 3, 2015 - link
Not saying it was the best tradeoff - just explaining. They quite literally could not go bigger in this case.testbug00 - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
the performances scaling as resolution increase is better than Nvidia, implying the ROPs aren't the bottleneck...chizow - Sunday, July 5, 2015 - link
No, that implies the shaders are the bottleneck at higher resolutions while ROP/fillrate/geometry remained constant. While Nvidia's bottleneck at lower resolutions isn't shader bound but their higher ROP/fillrate allows them to realize this benefit in actual FPS, AMD's ROPs are saturated and simply can't produce more frames.Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
Right now there's not a lot of evidence for R9 Fury X being ROP limited. The performance we're seeing does not have any tell-tale signs of being ROP-bound, only hints here and there that may be the ROPs, or could just as well be the front-end.While Hawaii was due for the update, I'm not so sure we need to jump up in ROPs again so soon.