The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTThe Test
On a brief note, since last month’s R9 Fury X review, AMD has reunified their driver base. Catalyst 15.7, released on Wednesday, extends the latest branch of AMD’s drivers to the 200 series and earlier, bringing with it all of the optimizations and features that for the past few weeks have been limited to the R9 Fury series and the 300 series.
As a result we’ve gone back and updated our results for all of the AMD cards featured in this review. Compared to the R9 Fury series launch driver, the performance and behavior of the R9 Fury series has not changed, nor were we expecting it to. Meanwhile AMD’s existing 200/8000/7000 series GCN cards have seen a smattering of performance improvements that are reflected in our results.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 Fury X AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 285 AMD Radeon HD 7970 ASUS STRIX R9 Fury Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 352.90 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.7 |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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Midwayman - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
I'd love to see these two go at it again once dx12 games start showing up.Mugur - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Bingo... :-). I bet the whole Fury lineup will gain a lot with DX12, especially the X2 part (4 + 4 GB won't equal 4 as in current CF). The are clearly CPU limited at this point.squngy - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
I don't know...Getting dx12 performance at the cost of dx11 performance sounds like a stupid idea this soon before dx12 games even come out.
By the time a good amount of dx12 games come out there will probably be new graphics cards available.
thomascheng - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
They will probably circle around and optimize things for 1080p and dx11, once dx12 and 4k is at a good place.akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
DX12 games are out now. DX12 does not degrade DX11 performance. In fact Radeon 290x is 33% faster than 980 Ti in DX12. Fury X just CRUSHES ALL nVIDIA silicon with DX12 and there is a reason for it.Dx11 can ONLY feed data to the GPU serially and sequencially. Dx12 can feed data Asynchronously, the CPU send the data down the shader pipeline WHEN it is processed. Only AMD has this IP.
@DoUL - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
Kindly provide link to a single DX12 game that is "out now".In every single review of the GTX 980 Ti there is this slide of DX12 feature set that the GTX 980 Ti supports and in that slide in all the reviews "Async Compute" is right there setting in the open, so I'm not really sure what do you mean by "Only AMD has this IP"!
I'd strongly recommend that you hold your horses till DX12 games starts to roll out, and even then, don't forget the rocky start of DX11 titles!
Regarding the comparison you're referring to, that guy is known for his obsession with mathematical calculations and synthetic benchmarking, given the differences between real-world applications and numbers based on mathematical calculations, you shouldn't be using/taking his numbers as a factual baseline for what to come.
@DoUL - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
My Comment was intended as a reply to @akanateauOldSchoolKiller1977 - Sunday, July 26, 2015 - link
You are an idiotic person, wishful think and dreams don't make you correct. As stated please provide a link to these so called DX12 games and your wonderful "Fury X just CRUCHES ALL NVidia" statement.Michael Bay - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
As long as there is separate RAM in PCs, memory argument is moot, as contents are still copied and executed on in two places.akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
Negative. Once Graphic data is processed and sent to the shaders it next goes to VRAM or video ram.System ram is what the CPU uses to process object draws. Once the objects are in the GPU pipes system ram is irrelevant.
IN fact that is one of AMD's stacked memory patents. AMD will be putting HBM on APU's to not only act as CPU cache but HBM video ram as well. They have patents for programmable HBM using FPGA's and reconfigurable cache memory HBM as well.
Stacked memory HBM can also be on the cpu package as a replacement for system ram. Can you imagine how your system would fly with 8-16gb of HBM instead of system ram?