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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refin3d - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
This is exactly what I was thinking... A few months ago when the 980 was launched I recall the 290X not being able to compete with it, and now they are trading blows. Shows some good work by the driver's team.Maybe AMD's cards are like a fine wine; you have to give them time to age before they reach their maximum potential haha.
jann5s - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Making driver improvements is nice, and shows commitment from AMD, but it could also mean the original state of the drivers was not so good, and there was indeed a lot to improve. I hope this is not the case, but I'm not sure.Asomething - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Amd drivers weren't as good, its one of the reasons they switched to GCN in the 1st place, their drivers got a lot better since those days apparently.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Apparently not, as most games don't run even for the reviewers on GCN "release day".The endless fantasies in amd fanboy minds though, those run, run their course, are debunked, go into schizoid mode and necromance themselves, then of course we are treated to the lying again.
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
SO FOR 2 FULL YEARS AMD 290 290X 290 UBER OWNERS GOT SCREWED " by the drivers that are just as good as Nvidia's as that problem amd had was 4 years ago or more" !!???I get it amd fanboy ... it's all you have left after the constant amd failures and whippings they've taken from nVidia - the fantasy about "amd drivers" TWO AND A HALF YEARS AFTER RELEASE.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
A conspiracy theory is that Nvidia has purposefully hampered performance for Kepler.Cellar Door - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Look at 780Ti - at launch 290X could not touch it. Where is the 780Ti now?!?!? - what a crappy investment was that for anyone that got one.
CiccioB - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
You may be over excited to have noted that in the review there's a GTX780, not a 780Ti. Seen the difference between the cards, if some improvements have been created, they are quite marginal.It's really funny to see these sort of myth raise from time to time without a real study on the thing. All impressions, not a single number reported as a proof of anything.
Yet, continue to believe in what you want. Unfortunately for you the market doesn't really care.
Cellar Door - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
You should check out the techpowerup review - they have a 780TI in it. Then you will understand what you here are calling a myth. 780TI is positioned just before a 290X, hahah, pretty sad to be honest.CiccioB - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
You can look at Anandtech reviews. The only game that was in benchmark suite as today is Crisis 3.Look what are the changes between the 290X and the 780 (not Ti).
Here the two boards when on par at 290X presentation, and they still are on par today.
You can see the difference are the same and we are speaking for 1FPS change for both GPUs. Yes, miraculous drivers. Come on, return on Earth with your fantasies.