The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
When the R9 Fury X launched, one of the games it struggled with was Battlefield 4, where the GTX 980 Ti took a clear lead. However for the launch of the R9 Fury, things are much more in AMD’s favor. The two R9 Fury cards have a lead just shy of 10% over the GTX 980, roughly in-line with their price tag difference. As a result of that difference AMD needs to win in more or less every game by 10% to justify the R9 Fury’s higher price, and we’re starting things off exactly where AMD needs to be for price/performance parity.
Looking at the absolute numbers, we’re going to see AMD promote the R9 Fury as a 4K card, but even with Battlefield 4 I feel this is a good example of why it’s better suited for high quality 1440p gaming. The only way the R9 Fury can maintain an average framerate over 50fps (and thereby reasonable minimums) with a 4K resolution is to drop to a lower quality setting. Otherwise at just over 60fps, it’s in great shape for a 1440p card.
As for the R9 Fury X comparison, it’s interesting how close the R9 Fury gets. The cut-down card is never more than 7% behind the R9 Fury X. Make no mistake, the R9 Fury X is meaningfully faster, but scenarios such as these question whether it’s worth the extra $100.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
288 Comments
View All Comments
mickulty - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Looks fantastic! Definitely getting one of these once the stock is there.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Yes paper launch for the r9 390X ... newegg is dry as a bone and just 15 reviews with zero stock only sapphire had about 10 cards to sell otherwise NO STOCK AT NEWEGG AT ALL.it's july 16th and the r9 390x is vapor
figus77 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Got a Sapphire Fury Tri-X (non OC version) the 16/7 in Italy... probably is newegg problem... and really is a good card, with catalyst 15.7 i got very nice results... With my system 8320, 16gb 1600hz, in Tomb Raider 2560x1440 all maxed out with TressFX on, FPS MIN: 58,0 - MED: 75,3 - MAX: 94,0Really good results. Witcher3 run stable beetween 45 to 50 fps in ultra setting in 2560x1440 and that casr is really silent you can't hear anything even after some long time playing.
Jtaylor1986 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Almost makes you wonder if AMD should have just designed the card with 54 compute units and would have had a winner on it's hand. Fury X seems to be somewhat unbalanced in terms of it's hardware configuration.Asomething - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
This imbalance comes from gcn's limitations, amd tried to compensate with the extra shaders.Ranger101 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Another quality Gpu review from Anandtech, in addition to being so early. Best of both worlds.jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
The sapphire Tri-X cooling solutions performs impressively under load. I think this a consequence of the abysmal configuration forced on videocards by the ATX standard. The sapphire card can exhaust the hot air freely because of the short PCB, which proves we could use a replacement for ATX (or shorter PCB's)Ian Cutress - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It would be interesting to see the effect of having 2 or 3 cards in one system using that paradigm for sure.jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
interesting for sure, any change sapphire will send another card?jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
speaking of which, what happened to BTX?