Hardware AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review

Whatever performs best or your brand preference is, I think monitor tech that locks you into a GPU manufacturer both sucks and blows.

It's the worst thing to happen to the market in ages. At least until VR does the same thing with games

 

It isn't the first bit of new tech to do that and it won't be the last. At the end of the day while it isn't the best thing in the world to lock people to a certain manufacturer, a company does have the right to reap the rewards for tech they put the time and money into developing.

I hope FreeSync comes on in leaps and bounds for the sake of the market, but thus far it isn't all that promising.

 

having lived with many disappointments when it comes to AMD GPU's for some reason i expected to see something better, some people never learn

 

My concern is that HBM is not a AMD exclusive, its just the next stage in GPU memory. Even if Nvidia where lazy and took the 980Ti and shoved HBM on it, it's likely it would still smoke the Fury.

So AMD better have a significant update to Fury progressing well, that fixes the core issues with their chips.

 

Rumours suggest the Fury X is going to be the only card to use HBM1, next year both AMD & Nvidia are supposed to be releasing new GPUs using 14nm and HBM2 (2Gb per stack).

It's impossible to just slap HBM on existing GPUs without redesigning them.

 

I think nVidia and AMD need to concentrate on a £120 card that can play games on ultra at 1080p. I think a lot of people are put off PC gaming by the upgrade cycle and graphics cards costing £300+. PCs could easily takeoff, if people could buy a £400 upgradeable machine that could sit under the TV and act as a media centre/console/PC. Alienware have an interesting machine, but the CPU isn't great and it is way overpriced.

I love PC gaming, but it is too expensive for the vast majority of people - I have a good job paying good money, but I can't justify paying over £200 on a graphics card. Most people aren't going to pay more money for an unfamiliar product that doesn't just 'work'.

 

Same with myself, but i'm hoping the next series will have a slightly cut Nano as a low-ish end card at about that price point! If it can MAX 1080p in new games, with a slight overhead for the future.. 4Gb vRAM and there's the perfect budget card! (We can only hope! )

 

and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to pamper to `gamers` who cant afford kit - want high end gaming? either wait till older kit is cheap second hand or pay the ££££

they are a business not a charity

 

I think you are overstating the costs. I invested in an Intel 2500k when it was first released. I am still using that cpu; it's great. My motherboard is an Asus Sabertooth, and I have 8gb of ram. Since buying that cpu and now, my only upgrade was a MSI 970 (I had a 560Ti, which I found a good little card). Now factor into this the cost of PC games: There are many sites around which offer some good deals, and the Steam sales offer a range of very playable titles for not much. Compare that to the cost of console games. Yes console hardware costs less than a capable PC, but it's the aggregate cost that matters. Naturally console hardware costs start to multiply when buying different machines to play specific games.
How all these factors even out is not straightforward.
If you do have a good job that pays good money, I am certainly perplexed that you cannot pay a certain sum for a decent mid-range graphics card.

 

About the review

The Good:
1080p benchmarked

The Bad:
Only 6 games reviewed and those few were primarily coded for Nvidia...

[Every review site that was going to get one of these early knew what they had to do to prepair, no excuse.]

There are much better reviews around, including http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_r9_fury_x_review,15.html

GameWorks has done a lot of damage to AMD because Nvivia pays developers to write code for them, and AMD is not permitted to use that code for driver revisions.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...surps-power-from-developers-end-users-and-amd

However, AMD's regularly released drivers improve upon performance, and this GPU is new, completely different from their previous top end GPUs.

Just a note, I wonder with all of the negative [flame or blind bias] remarks in this thread it looks as though this site, or at least this thread is extremely biased, entrenched in Nvidia's camp.

Yes, the GTX 980 Ti is a good card. I do not like the high temperatures, reaching over 80 degrees C, no matter what the reviewer said.

I have owned both AMD and Nvidia video cards, so, I am not biased. I am simply pointing out much of what many posts do not say, or mostly say that AMD is garbage and Nvidia is the champ [980 Ti and Titan X - which most people still call the Titan when talking about performance, and that shows ignorance, as the Titan X dominates the Titan].

If I purchase the Fury X, and I am not saying I will, it will be after better drivers for it have been released and gaming performance has been improved. Until then, I am standing on the side lines. If future AMD drivers make this card more awesome than it is, I can justify purchasing it, especially in the light that a $100 water cooler is part of the package.

 

Bit-tech uses the same games etc to benchmark EVERY card! They're not gonna get a different set of benchmarks for each card to make it look better! Secondly, RE: drivers.. That's the same for every card!

Jayztwocents (youtuber) review summed it up perfectly! The FuryX is the same as a 980Ti when it's not OC and the FuryX is.. But it's so close regardless it doesn't matter to me either way.. The thing that DOES matter is the PUMP! It's not PWM controlled, so i've heard.. So it'll be at 100% all the time.. Not that great when you want a quiet PC! Also, the coil whine which people've commented on here and there..

Is it a good card, yes. Does it hands down win at being top? No!

 

This card was not meant to win hands down against the Titan X and it's castrated brother, the 980 Ti. The Fury X was in the works far before the Titan X was brought to market. And, keep in mind the Fury X drivers are very new, and that has an effect on both Nvidia and AMD cards upon release - early drivers, especially new GPU architecture.

The pump and fan are very quiet, as is the coil whine [which is housed, making it even less of an issue]. One reviewer said all of the noise you mentioned would bother no one, except possibly some audio files - and certainly not me, my ears were damaged in combat, Vietnam War. I know, most people were not in combat, though many have listened to music obnoxiously loud.

It is most likely that I will not purchase the Fury X, unless drivers improve gaming performance at lower resolutions. And the biggest and only issue I have with the 980 Ti is some cards can get very hot, they need good cooling.

Here is a site that has many games, and I like the way the graphs are depicted, nice and neat.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_Fury_X/7.html

By the way, thank you for your comments, I appreciate feedback.

EDIT: Sorry, I had the wrong link up...

 

So why did AMD post their benchmarks before release (a) specifically pitting it against the 980ti and (b) showing it beating the 980ti?

Edit: These ones

 

That seems odd because AFAIK AMD worked with Creative Assembly on Alien: Isolation, BF4 was one one the first games to include AMD's Mantle, and they worked closely with Crytek on Crysis 3, so half of the games AMD worked with developers.

AMD had plenty of time and possibility to work with the remaining three developers the question is why they choose not to? Or at least not fully as GTA V includes Contact Hardening Shadows (CHS) that's part of AMD's Gaming Evolved initiative.

Not sure how you're defining paying developers, are we talking cold hard cash or are we talking about sending Nvidia technicians to help games developers?

What you say about not allowing AMD to use that code is a little misleading don't you think?
Yes Nvidia has very strict rules with regards to who has access to the source code of Gameworks but nothing prevents AMD from working on games that include the Gameworks compiled code in the form of dll's. Just like Microsoft closely guards the source code of Windows but people can do what they like (within reason) with the compiled dll's.

Indeed they do. The question I would ask however is why optimised drivers weren't ready on the day of release, it's not like they didn't know anything about the Fury X being released, or didn't have months and in some cases years to work with game developers prior to release.

Really? I thought its been a fairly balanced response from the BT community, perhaps you could point out "all of the negative [flame or blind bias] remarks in this thread"

You did read the review right? If so it means you know what the reviewer reported was the Delta T temperature, the temperature difference from ambient, not the actual temperature.

 

last check of the 6 games bit tech test with at least 4 were designed for AMD gpus as they were first developed for the consoles they are in and AMD has all the consoles then ported after.

Want a fair test and it's what AMD actually wants people doing using all of there own products so that includes AMD cpu and AMD ssd then we will see just how bad they truly are. Every review site does AMD a favour by benching with a top end Intel chip.

Fury x for me had to beat the 980ti across the board on most games tested and it does not do it on any of the reviews I've seen. And I've checked most of them even the the most biased AMD fan will see that fact.

Personally wish bit tech had tested dying light as that would of shown the issues the card has with lack of memory. Which what do you know is another title AMD helped develop. The devs themselves have said above 1080p you need a 6gb memory buffer or your performance dies and its shown in the 1-2 sites that have reviewed it.

Fury x is on average 22fps behind the 980ti at 1440p. And at 1440p it's slower than the 390x which is just lol. At 4k where neither card is really playable the gap does close but we are in the sub 30fps range which was deemed unplayable by the reviewer ( hardocp)

 

I think we're basically in agreement. Games are cheaper on PC. CPUs can last for years. PCs can be upgraded. I just think the market could be much bigger, if mid range graphics cards weren't deliberately 'nurfed' by the manufacturers in an attempt to force people to buy high end cards - e.g. the same chips from the same wafers are laser cut to shut down processing units. That actually costs the manufacturer money to make a card worse. Just sell the same GPUs cheaper and you'll get rave reviews and take market share from the competition. Instead, midrange cards appear to be designed to produce just below playable frame rates at full HD. Added to this are the confusing product line ups with 6 or 7 cards with very similar names, but wildly different prices. It is too confusing for the average consumer - e.g. is a 7790 better than a 7930?

 

Looks like a beast of a card, hoping that the price has come down by the time I'm ready to upgrade my pc.

 

Does AMD a favour by using an Intel CPU? HAHA

 

He doesn't half spout some nonsense at times.