AMD Radeon R9 Fury X 4GB Review

[George Phillips]

It will take a while for AMD to improve the driver to maximize the potential of Fury X. It might be too premature to call it a day. AMD also need to release their 8GB Fury X2 soon to release all this new architecture's power. Fury X is now being held back by some factors. It's a good direction for Radeon product line.

 

[youssef 2010]

This is a Great card from AMD. It's trading blows with the 980Ti and Titan X and has a slew of features to make it a compelling purchase. I have faith in AMD because the 290X I bought in late 2013 is still enough for my use (FHD gaming). While Nvidia is constantly changing GPUs (And let's not forget the mobile G-Sync and 3.5 GB GTX 970 fiascos), AMD has remained competetive for almost two years with the same GPUs.

I have said it before and I'll say it again. I have way more respect for AMD than for Nvidia and I have much more trust in AMD as a company.

 

[tomc100]

This is a Great card from AMD. It's trading blows with the 980Ti and Titan X and has a slew of features to make it a compelling purchase. I have faith in AMD because the 290X I bought in late 2013 is still enough for my use (FHD gaming). While Nvidia is constantly changing GPUs (And let's not forget the mobile G-Sync and 3.5 GB GTX 970 fiascos), AMD has remained competetive for almost two years with the same GPUs.

I have said it before and I'll say it again. I have way more respect for AMD than for Nvidia and I have much more trust in AMD as a company.

The reason why everyone is disappointed is because they are comparing it to the 980 Ti. The Fury X was really meant to compete against the GTX 980 but then Nvidia got scared so they spoiled the party by releasing the 980 Ti. Also, my Radeon 7970 has held up for nearly 4 years and hopefully the Fury Pro is somewhere between a 970 and 980. I honestly can't stand Nvidia and their gameworks garbage that sets tessellation at ridiculous levels in order to not just punish their competitors but even their own older gpus.

 

[George Phillips]

AMD has increased more than 20% performance through new drivers on 290x/290 since their debut. Similar or more increase can be expected from Fury X. It's amazing how 290x is keeping up with much expensive cards and catching up with GeForce GTX 980 after driver enhancement continuously. NVIDIA does have the advantage of releasing good drivers early. We need AMD to keep both NVIDIA and Intel in check. I also look forward to seeing AMD's next generation CPU architecture next year.

 

[Gurg]

AMD rolled the dice hoping for a technology home run and came up snake eyes. Millions of dollars in research, wasted effort and the reports were circulating that AMD is talking to investment brokers/advisors as to whether they can sell part of the company to raise some cash.

I'm not sure who will buy this card for $649-679 vs $679 for a highly overclockable aftermarket cooled 980 Ti which at factory overclocked settings beat the FuryX like a drum. Additionally the 980Ti with aftermarket coolers can be SLId. Given the performance numbers published today the FuryX is probably at least $100 overpriced, but can AMD break even at a $550 price? Anyone willing to take up their back exhaust port would appear to be better off buying a 295x for $659. AMD would probably have been far better off with the 390x and spending the cash and research dollars to improve their crossfire and 295x drivers as well as possibly offering dual 390x cards with a single CLC. with longer hoses that could be mounted outside the back exhaust opening.

Further the FuryX is an orphan that will be obsolete next year.

 

[ern88]

AMD needs needs to just give up on the Desktop CPU's and just focus on Laptop CPU and GPU's!!!

 

[littleleo]

Tom's was generous compared to HardOCP, I think the most telling factor is the AMD fan site Anandtech didn't post a review at all. They must be working out a way to make it appear as a win for AMD, good luck with that.

LMFAO!!!!

Anandtech an AMD fan site? It used to be an Intel fan site. I guess it changes from time to time.

What I see is If you want the best bang for the buck to play at QHD or 4K, do yourself a favor and buy a 290x

Go read the HardOCP review and see if you still feel the same.

 

[clonazepam]

It will take a while for AMD to improve the driver to maximize the potential of Fury X. It might be too premature to call it a day. AMD also need to release their 8GB Fury X2 soon to release all this new architecture's power. Fury X is now being held back by some factors. It's a good direction for Radeon product line.

This is a Great card from AMD. It's trading blows with the 980Ti and Titan X and has a slew of features to make it a compelling purchase. I have faith in AMD because the 290X I bought in late 2013 is still enough for my use (FHD gaming). While Nvidia is constantly changing GPUs (And let's not forget the mobile G-Sync and 3.5 GB GTX 970 fiascos), AMD has remained competetive for almost two years with the same GPUs.

I have said it before and I'll say it again. I have way more respect for AMD than for Nvidia and I have much more trust in AMD as a company.

The reason why everyone is disappointed is because they are comparing it to the 980 Ti. The Fury X was really meant to compete against the GTX 980 but then Nvidia got scared so they spoiled the party by releasing the 980 Ti. Also, my Radeon 7970 has held up for nearly 4 years and hopefully the Fury Pro is somewhere between a 970 and 980. I honestly can't stand Nvidia and their gameworks garbage that sets tessellation at ridiculous levels in order to not just punish their competitors but even their own older gpus.

Awww be nice to gameworks. It's just middleware. Developers do have the option to not use it and actually come up with their own solutions. The ones that do use it, find the alternative to be way more expensive and pretty much kill their deadlines. Anyway, its just a set of tools.

The issues come down to the developers taking the cheaper / quicker solution of plugging in middleware to get more advanced looking features into their game. Whether or not they have access to its source code is decided on a case by case basis. AMD pretty much depends on having access to a game's source code in order to optimize the game for their hardware. This idealogy they've chosen to take can then be problematic when dealing with source code that even the developers themselves may not have full access to. The developers chose to use the middleware, and AMD chooses to primarily focus on optimizing source code. Paths they have both chosen for themselves.

It's a situation that ends up being advantageous at times for Nvidia, but as a side effect and not the primary purpose.

Anyway, tessellation is absolutely awesome. It's a pretty much must have feature that looks great. AMD's had years to optimize for it, just like they've had years to work on compression. We'll see. People can buy now hoping for a promise that may or may not come down the line that it'll get better.

(this reply got so messed up in the formatting for some reason, I'm just submitting and hoping its not a mess and actually readable lol)

 

[scolaner]

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

 

[clonazepam]

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

just lol... I can only imagine how some of the comments make you feel. Do I educate or ignore? Is it worth the time? I feel for ya.

A few comments back I quoted someone talking about the images. Is it the backend security against data mining, just protection from people directly linking images? They don't always load, and pages have been reloaded many, many times to look at a pretty graph. 😉

 

[Mousemonkey]

And I really don't get people perpetually ranting on AMD's drivers

I bought a (single) 7790 in May 2013 and couldn't put it to use until February 2014 due to unstable drivers, that's why people rant about AMD drivers.

 

[littleleo]

AMD has increased more than 20% performance through new drivers on 290x/290 since their debut. Similar or more increase can be expected from Fury X. It's amazing how 290x is keeping up with much expensive cards and catching up with GeForce GTX 980 after driver enhancement continuously. NVIDIA does have the advantage of releasing good drivers early. We need AMD to keep both NVIDIA and Intel in check. I also look forward to seeing AMD's next generation CPU architecture next year.

Yes but we had to wait a year for their improvements. I seem to remember a couple of years ago their top of the line being released in December and the CF drivers not coming out until August.

 

[tomc100]

Awww be nice to gameworks. It's just middleware. Developers do have the option to not use it and actually come up with their own solutions. The ones that do use it, find the alternative to be way more expensive and pretty much kill their deadlines. Anyway, its just a set of tools.

The issues come down to the developers taking the cheaper / quicker solution of plugging in middleware to get more advanced looking features into their game. Whether or not they have access to its source code is decided on a case by case basis. AMD pretty much depends on having access to a game's source code in order to optimize the game for their hardware. This idealogy they've chosen to take can then be problematic when dealing with source code that even the developers themselves may not have full access to. The developers chose to use the middleware, and AMD chooses to primarily focus on optimizing source code. Paths they have both chosen for themselves.

It's a situation that ends up being advantageous at times for Nvidia, but as a side effect and not the primary purpose.

Anyway, tessellation is absolutely awesome. It's a pretty much must have feature that looks great. AMD's had years to optimize for it, just like they've had years to work on compression. We'll see. People can buy now hoping for a promise that may or may not come down the line that it'll get better.

You really think game developers just use middleware like gameworks for free? That's like saying DICE uses mantle for free or Tomb Raider uses TressFx for free. Most pc games are straight ports where developers have a very low opinion of the pc platform. Rocksteady took Nvidia's money and then outsourced their pièce de résistance Arkham Knight to an outside developer consisting of 12 people which is why it's a POS. If they aren't getting paid then most multiplatform games are basically straight ports from the xbone. Some games still even have the xbox buttons in their menus and some can only be played using an xbone controller. There's a couple of exceptions like GTA V that have the money to do it properly.

Tessellation works fine on AMD gpus. All you have to do is set up a new profile in catalyst controller and reduce tessellation to 8x or 16x and gameworks works fine, even better than some older Nvidia cards.

 

[littleleo]

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

No wonder it looks so different. And some of the articles are kind of ...eh. Tell them less is more if they don't have any real information to give.

 

[Calculatron]

It was almost four years ago when AMD came out with GCN, with the Radeon HD 7970, I do believe. It wasn't just a GPU-platform, but a long-term mission to help out programmers and developers with the evolving environment of the tech world. As a GPU platform, it was built with scalability and modularity in mind, and, holy crap, here we are today!

A lot of people here might boo-hoo that its raw performance, especially at 1440p, didn't shatter the current Nvidia line-up. However, it has on-par performance with the 980 TI and Titan X, without being too different in terms of heat and power consumption. At 4k, it actually pulls ahead slightly. If Nvidia had not put out the 980 TI and undercut its own Titan X (and why aren't people still outraged by this?) then people would be laughing their socks off.

I think we should congratulate AMD for managing to pull off what it did with an evolving architecture, while still staying at the 28nm process. I look forward to what further driver optimizations may have for this product.
(Also, if people are complaining about the price/raw-performance... why isn't anyone bringing up the R9 295x2?)

 

[littleleo]

And I really don't get people perpetually ranting on AMD's drivers

I bought a (single) 7790 in May 2013 and couldn't put it to use until February 2014 due to unstable drivers, that's why people rant about AMD drivers.

And that was one of their faster driver updates.

 

[Gl0cky]

Fury X should be compared to 980ti Hybrid to rule out temperature in the equation.

 

[Omegaclawe]

The problem with the Fury X is AMD doesn't win on, well, anything. Same price, same performance, same power, etc. as the 980ti. It's more or less just a different flavor of the same thing: choose which company you like. History shows that, for most people, that company is Nvidia. Meanwhile, with Zen, it's fine if it only matches Haswell blow for blow, so long as it's cheaper (and it almost certainly will be).

Additionally, for HTPC types, this isn't a real choice, due to the lack of HDMI 2.0 output. Perhaps that's not a huge category, but it should be noted.

Perhaps some sales for the newness factor, or early adoption of stacked memory, but the Fury X isn't the hero Gotham needs right now... perhaps the next generation will finally manage to blow us away. Particularly if we finally get that die shrink. Should have HDMI 2.0 and perhaps even be powerful enough to do 4k at 60hz on a single card.

 

[cangelini]

45% more shaders, 60% more memory bandwidth, only 20-30% better benchmarks than the 290X. Either there is another 10-20% extra performance that can be squeezed out by future driver refinements or Fiji is having trouble making efficient use of all the extra shaders and bandwidth.

I am glad to be proven right about more than 4GB not being necessary when there is enough memory bandwidth to avoid duplicating resources across multiple memory channels.

That is a good question. I hope it is the former (more performance with driver improvements) and not the latter.

I also have another question.

Chris, do you know anything about the warranty that is being provided for the GPU? How long and if it covers accidental damage to other components like the Corsair Hydro series does in case of a water leak?

Looks like the two cards listed on Newegg are being advertised with 2-year warranties.

 

[thor220]

As someone who is not a fanboy of either side of this isle, and someone who has held off starting a new build to replace this 8 year old dinosaur I'm typing on for news of these new releases, I have to say, I'm disappointed.

I guess in my heart I have been rooting for the underdog, hoping AMD would come out with some pizzazz. Instead it doesn't really. It really feels like it was just looking to get "on par" and that's kind of sad really, "just good enough". Someone earlier in these comments mention it wouldn't be enough for any converts, and while I had no prior allegiances, I would have to agree.

I will state this as my reason for probably finalizing this new build of mine with an 980Ti: all of my research has pointed to more reliable driver support from Nvidia and as someone who is by no means a hardcore gamer, when I want to play a game I want to do so reliably.

And since I am not really a 4k gamer, I guess this round for my purchase goes to the 980Ti.

I really had hoped.

If you were at all disgruntled by Nvidia's tactics, how does the Fury disappoint you so much that you are forced to go Nvidia?

If you are so easily swayed by an equal performing card, you never really intended to go AMD to begin with. Nvidia has better drivers? That's a joke. The only only thing Nvidia is good at is taking your money from their overpriced cards and crippling games like Project cars and the new batman game.

 

[siman0]

well..
some how i fell disappointment..

Yeah I mean look at how toms is using drivers that are 2 versions old...

 

[jimmysmitty]

45% more shaders, 60% more memory bandwidth, only 20-30% better benchmarks than the 290X. Either there is another 10-20% extra performance that can be squeezed out by future driver refinements or Fiji is having trouble making efficient use of all the extra shaders and bandwidth.

I am glad to be proven right about more than 4GB not being necessary when there is enough memory bandwidth to avoid duplicating resources across multiple memory channels.

That is a good question. I hope it is the former (more performance with driver improvements) and not the latter.

I also have another question.

Chris, do you know anything about the warranty that is being provided for the GPU? How long and if it covers accidental damage to other components like the Corsair Hydro series does in case of a water leak?

Looks like the two cards listed on Newegg are being advertised with 2-year warranties.

I guess we will have to wait and see what that warranty covers.

well..
some how i fell disappointment..

Yeah I mean look at how toms is using drivers that are 2 versions old...

The difference between 15.4 and 15.6 is pretty much nothing. 15.6 was a Batman AK CAP profile fix so it wouldn't add any performance to the R9 290X series.

Now if they ran the modded 15.15 drivers then it might add some performance to the R9 290X.

 

[FritzEiv]

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

No wonder it looks so different. And some of the articles are kind of ...eh. Tell them less is more if they don't have any real information to give.

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

just lol... I can only imagine how some of the comments make you feel. Do I educate or ignore? Is it worth the time? I feel for ya.

A few comments back I quoted someone talking about the images. Is it the backend security against data mining, just protection from people directly linking images? They don't always load, and pages have been reloaded many, many times to look at a pretty graph. 😉

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

just lol... I can only imagine how some of the comments make you feel. Do I educate or ignore? Is it worth the time? I feel for ya.

A few comments back I quoted someone talking about the images. Is it the backend security against data mining, just protection from people directly linking images? They don't always load, and pages have been reloaded many, many times to look at a pretty graph. 😉

Biggest travesty is learning Toms owns Anandtech now. And here I thought Anand was doing well enough to not have to be the forefront of article writing. In regards to this card, I wasn't expecting much overclocking room at all so even 8% is pretty surprising. I'm also glad they pit the card against non-factory oc'd devices for comparison. More interested in hearing about the R9 nano.

Sigh...we don't own AT. Our parent company does. And Anand retired.

just lol... I can only imagine how some of the comments make you feel. Do I educate or ignore? Is it worth the time? I feel for ya.

A few comments back I quoted someone talking about the images. Is it the backend security against data mining, just protection from people directly linking images? They don't always load, and pages have been reloaded many, many times to look at a pretty graph. 😉

The Tom's Hardware platform has a long history, which is another way of saying it's gotten a bit long in the tooth. We're doing an across the board (meaning our parent company) platform migration right now, which will lead to better performance, but also better features. Some of the image albums and other modules (commerce blocks, for example) that we use weren't necessarily intended for the kind of scale we have on Tom's Hardware, or were built for experimental purposes. That's a long winded way of saying: we're working on it.

As for responding to all of the comments, I think everyone here does a good job of debating the facts and the merits and down-voting those out of line. To those who thought, last week, we were biased towards (and perhaps paid by) Nvidia, and to those of you who this week believe we are in the pocket of AMD: I wish you'd organize yourselves, meet out on a field somewhere, and decide amongst yourselves which it is and get back to us on the final verdict.

As for AnandTech, our parent company has left editorial content and content direction untouched and uninfluenced in the 6 months it has been under our roof.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Both bare great cards (980Ti and Fury X), the decision-making factor comes down to whether the buyer is an AMD or Nvidia guy.

 

[red77star]

I run Crossfire 7970 and i am gaming on 1080p and guess what. Every game i can max...really for nowdays SLI or Crossfire setup of 2x $200 card will give you awesome gaming experience across the board pushing max details. Setup i have would probably be fine on 1440p which is the sweetest spot between 1080p and 4k. 4K -> meh