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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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