The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2015 11:15 AM ESTMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect of current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
With Shadow of Mordor things finally start looking up for AMD, as the R9 Fury X scores its first win. Okay, it’s more of a tie than a win, but it’s farther than the R9 Fury X has made it so far.
At 4K with Ultra settings the R9 Fury X manages an average of 48.3fps, a virtual tie with the GTX 980 Ti and its 47.9fps. Dropping down to Very High quality does see AMD pull back just a bit, but with a difference between the two cards of just 0.7fps, it’s hardly worth worrying about. Even 2560 looks good for AMD here, trailing the GTX 980 Ti by just over 1fps, at an average framerate of over 80fps. Overall the R9 Fury X delivers 98% to 101% of the performance of the GTX 980 Ti, more or less tying the direct competitor to AMD’s latest card.
Meanwhile compared to the R9 290X, the R9 Fury X doesn’t see quite the same gains. Performance is a fairly consistent 26-28% ahead of the R9 290X, less than what we’ve seen elsewhere. Earlier we discussed how the R9 Fury X’s performance gains will depend on which part of the GPU is getting stressed the most; tasks that stress the shaders show the most gains, and tasks that stress geometry or the ROPs potentially show the lowest gains. In the case of SoM, I believe we’re seeing at least a partial case of being geometry/ROP influenced.
Unfortunately for AMD, the minimum framerate situation isn’t quite as good as the averages. These framerates aren’t bad – the R9 Fury X is always over 30fps – but even accounting for the higher variability of minimum framerates, they’re trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 13-15% with Ultra quality settings. Interestingly at 4K with Very High quality settings the minimum framerate gap is just 3%, in which case what we are most likely seeing is the impact of running Ultra settings with only 4GB of VRAM. The 4GB cards don’t get punished too much for it, but for R9 Fury X and its 4GB of HBM, it is beginning to crack under the pressure of what is admittedly one of our more VRAM-demanding games.
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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.