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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CiccioB - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
For a GPU that was expected to beat Titan X hands down, just being faster than 980 is quite a fail.Also due to the high cost technology involved in producing it.
Be happy for that, and just wait or DX12 to have some hope to gain few FPS with respect to the competitor.
I just think DX12 is not going to change anything (whatever these cards will gain will be the same for nvidia cards) and few FPS more or less is not what we expected from this top ties class (expensive) GPU.
Despite the great steps ahead made by AMD in power consumption, it still is a fail.
Large, expensive, still consuming more, and badly scaling.
Hope that with the new 16nm FinFet PP things will change radically, or we will witness a 2 year dominance again by nvidia with high prices.
superjim - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Used 290's are going for sub-$200 (new for $250). Crossfire those and you get better performance for much less.P39Airacobra - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
Ok compared to the Fury X, The Regular R9 Fury makes a bit more sense than the X model. It is priced better (But still priced a bit too much) And it has almost even performance with the X model. However the power consumption is still insane and unreasonable for todays standards! And the temps are way too high for a triple fan card! With a 70c temp running triple fans I doubt there is any room at all for overclocking! I do respect this card's performance! But it is just not worth it for the price you have to pay for a hefty PSU, And the very loud and expensive cooling setup you will have to put inside your case! To be honest: If I was stuck with a old GTX 660 Ti, And someone offered me a R9 Fury for even trade, I would not do it!ES_Revenge - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
The power consumption is not insane or unreasonable for "today's standards". Only the GTX 960, 970, 980, Titan X are better. So it's unreasonable for Nvidia's new standard but it's actually an improvement over Hawaii, etc. of the past.Compared to current Nvidia offerings, it's bad yeah but we can't really established standards on their cards alone. R9 390/X, 380, etc. are still power hungry for their performance and they are still "today's" cards, like it or not.
Don't get me wrong I agree they really need to start focusing on power/heat reduction, but we're not going to see that from AMD until their next gen cards (if they make it that far, lol).
Gunbuster - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
AMD thread with no Chizow comments? My world is falling apart :POxford Guy - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
I'm sure this person has more than one alias.FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
We'd know him by his words, his many lengthy words with links and facts up the wazoo, and he is so proud he would not hide with another name, like a lousy, incorrect, uninformed, amd fanboy failure.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Just think about placing your bare hand on 3 plugged in 100 Watt light bulbs ... that's AMD's housefire for you !My god you could cook a steak on the thing.
3X 100 watter light bulbs frying everything in your computer case... awesome job amd.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Because the GTX 480 was quieter, had better performance per watt, and was a fully-enabled chip.FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
So the 480 being hot makes this heated furnace ok ?What exactly is the logic there ?
Are you a problematic fanboy for amd ?