The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The final game in our review of the R9 Fury X is our most recent addition, Grand Theft Auto V. The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
Closing out our gaming benchmarks, the R9 Fury is once again in the lead, besting the GTX 980 by as much as 15%. However GTA V also serves as a reminder that the R9 Fury doesn’t have quite enough power to game at 4K without compromises. And if we do shift back to 1440p, a more comfortable resolution for this card, AMD’s lead is down to just 5%. At that point the R9 Fury isn’t quite covering its price advantage.
Meanwhile compared to the R9 Fury X, we close out roughly where we started. The R9 Fury trails the more powerful R9 Fury X by 5-7% depending on the resolution, a difference that has more to do with GPU clockspeeds than the cut-down CU count. Overall the gap between the two cards has been remarkably consistent and surprisingly narrow.
99th percentile framerates however are simply not in AMD’s favor here. Despite AMD’s driver optimizations and the fact that the GTX 980 only has 4GB of VRAM, the R9 Fury X could not pull ahead of the GTX 980, so the R9 Fury understandably fares worse. Even at 1440p the R9 Fury cards can’t quite muster 30fps, though in all fairness even the GTX 980 falls just short of this mark as well.
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bill.rookard - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Impressive results, especially by the Sapphire card. The thing I'm glad to see is that it's such a -quiet- card overall. That bodes well for some of the next releases (I'm dying to see the results of the Nano) and bodes well for AMD overall.Two things I'd like to see:
1) HBM on APU. Even if it were only 1GB or 2GB with an appropriate interface (imaging keeping the 4096 bit interface and either dual or quad-pumping the bus?). The close location of being on-die and high speed of the DRAM would be a very, VERY interesting graphics solution.
2) One would expect that with the cut down on resources, there would have been more of a loss in performance. On average, you see a 7-8% drop in speed after a loss of 13-14% cut in hardware resources and a slight drop in clock speeds. So - where does that mean the bottleneck in the card is? It's possible that something is a bit lopsided internally (it does however perform exceptionally well), so it would be very interesting to tease out the differences to see whats going on inside the card.
mr_tawan - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It would be very interesting to run HBM as the system ram instead of DDR on APU. 4GB (for the 1) wouldn't be a lot and may choke on heavy work load, but for casual user (and tablet uses) that's probably enough.It would also allow smaller machine than NUC form factor, I think.
looncraz - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
HBM wouldn't be terribly well suited for system RAM due to its comparatively low small-read performance and physical form factor. On an APU, for example, it would probably be best used as a single HBM[2] chip on a 1024-bit bus. Probably just 1 or 2GB, largely dedicated to graphics. That is 128GB/s with HBM1 (but 1GB max), 256GB/s with HBM2 (with, IIRC, 4GB max).For a SoC, though, such as the NUC form factor, as you mentioned, it is potentially a game changer only AMD can deliver on x86. Problem is that the net profit margins in that category are quite small, and AMD needs to be chasing higher net margin markets (net margin being a simple result of market volume, share, and product margin).
I'd love to see it, though, for laptops. And with Apple and AMD being friendly, we may end up seeing it. As well as probably seeing it find its way into the next generation of consoles.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Given the high prices Intel is charging for its NUC systems are you really certain it's not profitable? Perhaps sales aren't good because they're overpriced.Stuka87 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
The only way to keep the 4096bit bus would be to use four HBM chips, and I highly doubt this would be the case. I am thinking an APU would use either a single HBM chip, or possibly two. The performance boost would still be huge.ajlueke - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
1) I can't imagine we won't see this. APU scaling with RAM speed was pretty well documented, I would be surprised if there were socket AM4 motherboards that incorporated some amount of HBM directly. Also, AMD performs best against NVidia at 4K, suggesting that Maxwell may be running into a memory bandwidth bottleneck itself. It will be interesting to see how Pascal performs when you couple a die-shrink with the AMD developed HBM2.2) It does suggest that Fiji derives far more benefit from faster clocks versus more resources. That makes the locked down voltages for the Fury X even more glaring. You supply a card that is massively overpowered, with 500W of heat dissipation but no way to increase voltages to really push the clock speed? I hope we get custom BIOS for that card soon.
silverblue - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
As regards APU scaling, it's a tough one. More bandwidth is good, however scaling drops above 2133MHz which shows you'd need more hardware to consume it. Would you put in more shaders, or ROPs? I'd go for the latter - don't APUs usually top out at 8 ROPs? Sure, add in more bandwidth, but at the very least, increase how much the APU can actually draw. The HD 4850 had 32 TMUs (like the 7850K) but 16 ROPs, which is double that on offer here.I keep seeing complaints about AMD's ROP count, so perhaps there's some merit to them.
Nagorak - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
It's hard to say what the bottleneck is with memory scaling on APUs. It could be something related to the memory controller built into the CPU rather than the GPU not having the resources to benefit.silverblue - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Isn't there a 256-bit Radeon Memory Bus link between memory and the GPU? Just a question.Stuka87 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Is it just me, or is the 290X faster now than it used to be when compared to the 980? Perhaps the 15.7 drivers offered some more performance?