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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Goty - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Can you imagine the hassle upgrades would be with having to deal with two sockets instead of one?Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Not if the GPU socket standard is universal and backward compatible like PCI-E. It's only if companies get to make incompatible/proprietary sockets that that would be an issue.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Yeah, let's put an additional 300 watts inside a socket laying flat on the motherboard - we can have a huge tube to flow the melting heat outside the case...Yep, that gigantic 8.9B trans core die, slap some pins on it... amd STILL loves pinned sockets...
Yeah, time to move to the motherboard ... ROFLMAO
I just can't believe it ... the smartest people in the world.
ant6n - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
I'm definitely interested to see how well these cards would do in a rotated atx Silverstone case. I have one of those, and I'm concerned about the alignment of the fins. You basically want the heat to be able to move up vertically, out the back/top of the card.ajlueke - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Priced in between the GTX 980 and the Fury X it is substantially faster than the former, and hardly any slower than the latter. Price performance wise this card is a fantastic option if it can be found around the MSRP, or found at all.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
NO, actually if you read, ha ha, and paid attention, lol, 10% more price for only 8% more performance... so it's ratio sucks compared to the NVIDIA GTX 980.Not a good deal, not good price perf compared to NVIDIA.
Thanks for another amd fanboy blowout
Nagorak - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
One interesting thing from this review is looking at the performance of the older AMD cards. The improvement of the Fury vs the older cards was mentioned by Ryan Smith in the review, noting that performance hasn't improved that much. But there's a lot more to it than that. The relative performance of AMD's cards seem to have moved up a lot compared to their Nvidia competitors.Look at how the 290X stacks up against the GTX 780 in this review. It pretty much just blows it away. The 290X is performing close to the GTX 980 (which explains why the 390X which has faster memory is competitive with it). Meanwhile, the HD 7970 is now stacking up against the GTX 780.
Now, look back at the performance at the time the 290X was released: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-2...
It looks like performance on AMD's GCN chips has increased significantly. Meanwhile the GTX 780's performance has at best stayed the same, but actually looks to have decreased.
Anandtech should really do a review of how performance has changed over time on these cards, because it seems the change has been pretty significant.
Nagorak - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
I don't know, maybe it's just different benchmark settings but the AMD cards look to be a bit more competitive to their counterparts than they were at release.Stuka87 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Its been the case with all GCN cards. AMD continues to make driver optimizations. The 7970 is significantly faster now that it was at launch. Its one advantage of them all sharing a similar architecture.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
nvidia CARDS GAIN 10-20% AND MORE over their release drivers... but that all comes faster, on game release days, and without massive breaking of prior fixes, UNLIKE AMD, who takes forever and breaks half of what it prior bandaided, and it takes a year or two or three or even EOL for that fix to come.