ASUS STRIX R9 Fury DC3 Video Card Review @ [H]

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ASUS STRIX R9 Fury DC3 Video Card Review - AMD's Radeon Fury X is here, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury presents itself and we evaluate a full retail custom ASUS STRIX R9 Fury using ASUS' new DirectCU III technology. We will compare this to a GeForce GTX 980 using the new drivers AMD just released and find out what kind of gameplay experience the R9 Fury has to offer.
 
Another flop. As predicted, this card loses to the 980 in most key areas.
AMD doesn't care about the poor value on these cards, they're manufacturing so few Fiji GPUs all of these cards are selling out anyway.

I hope it's worth ruining their reputation to sell a handful of over-priced GPUs to dedicated fanboys.
 
Perfect card.
sits in between the 980ti/Fury x and can match them.
My gaming will be silky smooth once I get my hands on this baby
 
What is AMD thinking with pricing, honestly? Fury X and now this? Fury Pro needs to be $450 -- here's hoping AMD wakes up and smells the coffee soon.

There's also the fact that they're competing here with a card that's 8 month old and only performing on par.
 
Fixed - Kyle

But, i do agree with your point, this card should be $499-529 range.
 
Another flop. As predicted, this card loses to the 980 in most key areas.
AMD doesn't care about the poor value on these cards, they're manufacturing so few Fiji GPUs all of these cards are selling out anyway.

I hope it's worth ruining their reputation to sell a handful of over-priced GPUs to dedicated fanboys.

it's not great but i wouldn't call it a flop performance wise, pretty much every game it got stomped in when everything was turned on was, take a guess.. while using nvidia gameworks features.. turn them off and magically the cards 6%+ fps faster than the 980.. i'd say the biggest thing is the power usage numbers look damn entising over the 390x. better performance and roughly 100-120w less which is quite nice to see. the price drop from nvidia screwed em pretty hard but that was to be expected. i think next years going to be the big year from both sides with 16nm and both companies using HBM 2.0, should be interesting.
 
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Well done, honest review.

Looks like a pretty nice GPU all in all.

For the sake of those that want one, I hope more partners come on board and make cards.

I can't wait to see 390X vs Fury results.:eek:
 
Already corrected - Kyle

Looks like a great card. Glad to see the Nvidia GameWorks effects performance on / off testing. The 15.7 driver seems to have made a huge positive change for the Fury. Wonder what's up with Battlefield 4 though. Guess the driver needs more tweaks.

AMD needs to send Unwinder one of these cards so that he can unlock the voltage in MSI Afterburner. I'd love to see what one can do overclocked.
 
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Already corrected - Kyle

Looks like a great card. Glad to see the Nvidia GameWorks effects performance on / off testing. The 15.7 driver seems to have made a huge positive change for the Fury. Wonder what's up with Battlefield 4 though. Guess the driver needs more tweaks.

AMD needs to send Unwinder one of these cards so that he can unlock the voltage in MSI Afterburner. I'd love to see what one can do overclocked.

BF4 would probably benefit more from pixel fillrate than it would texture fillrate, and GTX 980 has a higher pixel fillrate. But this is just a theory on my part.
 
BF4 would probably benefit more from pixel fillrate than it would texture fillrate, and GTX 980 has a higher pixel fillrate. But this is just a theory on my part.

Get some rest. :) We need your hands and eyes refreshed for the next stage of Fury / Fury X / 390 / 390X testing. :D
 
Hmmm, this situation very much resembles the one between R9 290 and 290x when they came out except there's no good overclocking options yet. Guess I'll have to wait this one out after all.

16nm/14nm we go.
 
From what I am hearing this morning, to put it simply, is not to expect much overclocking at all on the Fury GPUs as those stand right now. It seems as if even getting a small 20MHz clock bump is not panning out on many pieces of Fury silicon.
 
Honest review, thanks.
It does surprisingly well when settings are turned down, but when you spend that much you want to turn them up.
As pointed out, the value between it, the 980 and 290x/390x isnt there.
It certainly is worth plonking down a bit more cash for a 980ti.
Significantly drop the price AMD and (overclocking aside) it competes well with the 980 in many things but not so well with other AMD cards.

The battle to prevent 4GB being a bottleneck appears to be impacting it.
My guess is that games that are not specifically optimised, or that use so much vram they cant be optimised enough are suffering from the driver reserving vram for caching. This reduces available vram.
If so, performance will have to be maintained in the future with driver optimisations for each specific game.
It may also be futile for those games that exceed 4GB by a large margin.

Remains to be seen.
It would be nice if AMD would clarify what is happening.
 
Looks pretty even, aside from the price. ROPs are the same on both so there is no sheer number advantage like with the 980Ti (yes the silicon implementations are probably pretty different). Kind of sucks that they can finally pull a couple of wins here with new drivers and then drop the ball on the cost, though, especially with no reference cards available.

Is 4k going to be a seperate review, or is it even worth it with this tier of cards? The PR cards compare at 4k, but yeah, we've seen that show before....

Will be very interesting to see the OC power numbers on the Fury without the benefits of water cooling.

I'm pretty certain the 4GB memory thing can be optimized around, just like the "3.5GB" limit on the 970. Nvidia does a pretty damn good job keeping memory usage in check, so no technical reason why AMD shouldn't be able to as well...practically, though, we will have to wait and see.
 
Is 4k going to be a seperate review, or is it even worth it with this tier of cards? The PR cards compare at 4k, but yeah, we've seen that show before....

No, I see no reason to explore Fury at 4K currently.
 
From looking at other reviews, looks like AMD PR pushed pretty hard for 4k-centric benches. Unfortunately, while the performance is better there vs 980, the card still cant push acceptable fps.

To be clear, Fury Pro is an exciting card IF they lower the price sub $500.
 
From looking at other reviews, looks like AMD PR pushed pretty hard for 4k-centric benches. Unfortunately, while the performance is better there vs 980, the card still cant push acceptable fps.

To be clear, Fury Pro is an exciting card IF they lower the price sub $500.

The Fury X would have been "exciting" @ sub $600 as well. I'm glad that [H] did a little more depth in the "apples to apples". It did make me raise an eye-brow, but it wasn't a "oh look, see, there is proof nVidia is the devil".

The Fury actually showed up to the party this time and actually competed beyond "ambient noise". If you are a fan of team Red, the difference might be "acceptable" this time around.
 
HBM is going to be a big cost for these cards so like many new innovations the consumer cost will be higher. Next generation will hopefully reduce costs thanks to having 1st generation now.
 
I think the best part of the review is the intro. Tears were definitely shed.

My last company did this towards the end. Tried to sell at a good gross margin, everything else be damned. They ended up pricing themselves out of the game, overheads went up, spiraled into a circle of death. To TaintedSquirrels point if they sell out anyways due to limited supply... Why not.
 
If nvidia drops 980 to 429-449 it will really shit on AMDs Cheerios.
As for the review, I wouldn't pay 550 for Fury but rather overclock the 980 to make up the performance deficit and keep 50 in my pocket.
 
Plus 1 to the Gameworks On/Off testing. Really shows how bad that black box is and I'd turn off those features anyhow.
 
I'm puzzled for the lack of partners.

Not even from AMD only like Powercolor, XFX and Visiontek and they both have Fury X cards...
 
I'm puzzled for the lack of partners.

Not even from AMD only like Powercolor, XFX and Visiontek and they both have Fury X cards...
I would blame it on lack of GPUs (HBM specifically), but... ASUS?
If AMD had a choice they probably would have given first priority to their exclusive partners.

Diamond, XFX, PowerColor, HIS, Sapphire.

Sapphire is a given, but why ASUS?
 
I think most people look to Sapphire for non-reference AMD cards anyway, so the lack of Gigabyte or MSI probably won't affect overall sales.

Gah, getting off topic....
 
Did you notice any graphical differences at default driver setting between the cards, after the last kerfuffle?
 
Card seems to perform ok, market will dictate its price in the coming weeks. For the Review, I'm still not enthused by the game selection, but the display on/off of Gameworks features helps to achieve a more accurate performance representation though it can still be deceiving.

I have to say after seeing the size of a Fury X, all other graphics cards look huge and dated now and this one is no exception. Dated is the best way I can describe how the Fury X looks a step ahead now, compared to the big honking cards.
 
All just theoretical for me, as anything about $200 is far outside my budget for a video card.

I do appreciate the benches with NVIDIA GameWorks tech turned off, but I don't think the performance advantage of the Fury with non-NVIDIA specific technology was highlighted enough in the conclusion. When not using technology designed by and for NVIDIA, the Fury can perform up to 30% faster than the 980, and you conclude it a wash for performance and overpriced?

Certainly I do not begrudge NVIDIA for developing Gameworks, and it working better on NVIDIA cards, and game developers using it. But not all games will use these NVIDIA optimization, and some may even optimize for the Fury cards. With the performance advantage the Fury has over the 980 using just DX11 features, I can only imagine if the games were optimized for the Fury instead of NVIDIA cards how much better it would perform. Maybe it's not so overpriced after all.
 
Perfect card.
sits in between the 980ti/Fury x and can match them.
My gaming will be silky smooth once I get my hands on this baby

Did you even read the review or are you just making shit up?

Great review. Cool card, but again AMD is late to the party and has another overpriced product.

Really looking forward to seeing the updated Fury X drivers, and the CrossFire reviews, the cards look to scale quite well from what I have seen.

Would be great to get a [H] review of the equipment.
 
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Good card! Thanks for the review guys. Also check out the Fury Tri-X, amazing acoustics apparently.

Too bad you guys didnt get to bench 4K, was looking forward to those scores, checking other reviews they show its as per usual, AMD does better the higher the res. Looking forward to the crossfire review as fury looks to scale really well with all that bandwidth on board. I think DX12 is really going to open these cards up!
 
So HBM is expensive to introduce in products, hence the cards aren't cheap and undercutting NVIDIA would be unacceptable to AMD. Is that it?

That would make it pretty clear: the premium isn't for performance, it's for noise.

This looks to be a great card for folks who want quiet. But then I suppose the issue is that you can't fit these beasts into the majority of HTPCs, if any. So many 'for the quiet' folks can't use it.
The performance gaming crowd doesn't get enough out of this proposal; quiet may be nice but not that nice, and not at the cost of performance relative to the 980.

As someone said above, this proposal sucks for a performance seeking gamer compared to the 980 on a 'budget', or really, the 980Ti for 15% more money.

Holy shit did the 980Ti burn down AMD's barn.
 
I think the conclusions will depend greatly on the games reviewed. Fiji seems to have a particular strength and if a game plays to that, then it will handily beat the 980.

For example, in PC Perspective's review, the Fury is ~25% faster than the 980 in Crysis 3 and Metro: Last Light at 1440p. They ended up highly praising it.

That said, it is $70-80 more expensive (and in some cases, $100+) than a custom 980, so I think people would prefer consistent performance instead of 20% higher in specific games and 0% in others.
 
I do appreciate the benches with NVIDIA GameWorks tech turned off, but I don't think the performance advantage of the Fury with non-NVIDIA specific technology was highlighted enough in the conclusion. When not using technology designed by and for NVIDIA, the Fury can perform up to 30% faster than the 980, and you conclude it a wash for performance and overpriced

Gameworks seems to skew results in ways that are designed to be hard to identify, even off. 30% is very significant and I agree with looking into. I do not think the card is overpriced, but always let the market decide first before buying in.
 
I think the conclusions will depend greatly on the games reviewed. Fiji seems to have a particular strength and if a game plays to that, then it will handily beat the 980.

For example, in PC Perspective's review, the Fury is ~25% faster than the 980 in Crysis 3 and Metro: Last Light at 1440p. They ended up highly praising it.

That said, it is $70-80 more expensive (and in some cases, $100+) than a custom 980, so I think people would prefer consistent performance instead of 20% higher in specific games and 0% in others.

They only do 60s tests.
Far too easy to cherry pick.
 
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