The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTGRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments layered with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
In our R9 Fury X review, we pointed out how AMD is GPU limited in this game below 4K, and while the R9 Fury’s lower performance essentially mitigates that to a certain extent, it doesn’t change the fact that AMD is still CPU limited here. The end result is that at 4K the R9 Fury is only 2% ahead of the GTX 980 – less than it needs to be to justify the price premium – and at 1440p it’s fully CPU-limited and trailing the GTX 980 by 14%.
On an absolute basis AMD isn’t faring too poorly here, but AMD will need to continue dealing with and resolving CPU bottlenecks on DX11 titles if they want the R9 Fury to stay ahead of NVIDIA, as DX11 games are not going away quite yet.
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Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
"What exactly is the logic there?"I really need to spell it out for you?
The logic is that the 480 was a successful product despite having horrid performance per watt and a very inefficient (both in terms of noise and temps) cooler. It didn't get nearly the gnashing of teeth the recent AMD cards are getting and people routinely bragged about running more than one of them in SLI.
CiccioB - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
No, it was not a successful product at all, though it was still the fastest card on market.The successful card was the 460 launched few months later and surely the 570/580 cards which brought the corrections to the original GF100 that nvidia itself said it was bugged.
Here, instead, we have a card which uses a lot of power, it is not on top of the charts and there's really no fix at the horizont for it.
The difference was that with GF100 nvidia messed up the implementation of the architecture which was then fixxed, here we are seeing what is the most advanced implementation of a really not so good architecture that for 3 years has struggled to keep the pace of the competitions which at the end has decided to go with a 1024 shaders + 128bit wide bus in a 220mm^2 die space against a 1792 shader + 256bit wide bus in a 356mm^2 die space instead of trying to have the latest fps longer bar war.
AMD, please, review your architecture completely or we are doomed with next PP.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
"No, it was not a successful product at all"It was successful. Enthusiasts bought them in a significant number and review sites showed off their two and three card rigs. The only site that even showed their miserable performance per watt was techpowerup
Count Vladimir - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
So we are discussing 6 year old products now? Is that your version of logic? Yes, it was hot, yes, it was buggy but it was still the fastest video card in its era, that's why people bragged about SLI'ing it. Fury X isn't.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
"So we are discussing 6 year old products now?" strawmancelebrevida - Thursday, July 16, 2015 - link
Looks like Jason Evangelho of PCWorld has the matter settled. In his article:http://www.pcworld.com/article/2947547/components-...
He shows that R9 Fury x2 is on par with GTX 980 Ti x 2 and blows away GTX 980 x2. Considering that R9 Fury x2 is much cheaper than GTX 980 Ti x2 and also R9 Fury is optimized for upcoming DX12, it looks like R9 Fury is the clear winner in cost/performance.
xplane - Saturday, October 17, 2015 - link
So with this GPU I could use 5 monitors simultaneously? Right?kakapoopoo - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link
i got the sapphire version up to 1150 stably using msi after burner w/o changing anything else