The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. Since R9 Fury is a cut-down and lower clocked Fiji part, what we’re expecting here is a significant shader/texture hit, with a much smaller hit to tessellation and pixel throughput.
TessMark scores more or less perfectly scale with clockspeed in this case. The R9 Fury is almost precisely 5% behind the R9 Fury X.
As for 3DMark Vantage, the performance hits are in-line with expectations. The R9 Fury takes a pretty significant hit to texturing performance due to the combination of lost texture units and the clockspeed reduction, while pixel throughput trails by just under 5%. This indicates that at least for the purposes of the 3DMark test, the R9 Fury series is ROP bottlenecked rather than memory bandwidth bottlenecked, a consequence of AMD’s excellent delta color compression.
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Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
2% cost difference is likely to be erased by sale pricing at various times.darkfalz - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
My 980 is about 15% from stock, and it's a poor overclocker despite running cool. These cards struggle to hit 10%. I also can't go back 6 months ago and buy a R9 Fury. And Nvidia's next release is likely around the corner. I think they're approximately equal value - which is good for AMD fans, but it's been a long wait for them to have a card comparable to what NVIDIA enthusiasts have been enjoying for a year!Flunk - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It's nice to see AMD win a segment. I'm not sure that the Fury X matters that much in the grand scheme of things, seeing that it's the same price as the better performing Geforce 980 TI.The Fury seems to overclock to almost match the Fury X, making it a good enthusiast buy.
cmikeh2 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
If you're willing to over clock though, you can get a good 15+ percent out of the 980 and pretty much bring it even with an OCed Fury for a little less money.looncraz - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
But as soon as voltage control is unlocked the fury will probably eek out at least another 100MHz or more, which will put it healthily out of reach of the 980. And, once a few more driver issues (such as GTA V performance) the performance of the Fury will improve even more.HBM has a different performance profile, and AMD is still accommodating that. And, of course, if you turn the nVidia image quality up to AMD levels, nVidia loses a few extra percent of performance.
The GTX 980 vs R9 Fury question is easy to answer (until a 980 price drop). The Fury X vs 980 Ti question is slightly more difficult (but the answer tends to go the other way, the AIO cooler being the Fury X's main draw).
D. Lister - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
"if you turn the nVidia image quality up to AMD levels, nVidia loses a few extra percent of performance."Surely we have some proof to go along with that allegation... ?
silverblue - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
I've heard the same thing, although I believe it was concerning the lack of anisotropic filtering on the NVIDIA side. However, anisotropic filtering is very cheap nowadays as far as I'm aware, so it's not really going to shake things up much whether it's on OR off, though image quality does improve noticeably.D. Lister - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Err...http://international.download.nvidia.com/webassets...
You mean to say that it doesn't work like it is supposed to?
silverblue - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
I'm not sure what you're getting at. In any case, I was trying to debunk the myth that turning off AF makes a real difference to performance.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
no, there's no proof, the proof of course is inside the raging gourd of the amd fanboy, never be unlocked by merely sane mortal beings.