AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Video Card Review @ [H]

and I bought a bag of hotdogs and buns to celebrate this week...Thanks AMD!

The part that really hurt the most out of the review was the portion where the 980Ti gave the middle finger to the Fury X on BF4. :eek:
 
I have to go with the best price/performance and that's the 980ti. I've already waited a long time for this and I'm not going to wait for an 8GB version. 4K is my thing now and I'll start saving up for a second 980ti.

Now if this card was $500 as others have said I'd think about it seriously as I suspect two of them would be good at 4k for many things, though the memory limit might still make me think twice (DX12 games being a while away). Also although the 980ti runs warmer, I'll never have to worry about it leaking. And should I ever need it the 980ti has HDMI 2, though my TV has a display port, still all in all this is not the 4k killer card AMD seemed to be promising us and I really don't want to wait x months for an 8GB higher clocked version.
 
I only read the apples to apples and I saw the Fury X match or be within 5-8 FPS of the 980 Ti on Min and AVG for pretty much all games. Wattage was within 20 watts and it was 25 degrees cooler. For the same price as the 980 Ti I'd say this is alright. It doesn't blow the 980 Ti out of the water but it runs cooler and doesn't cost more.

5-8 fps on those apples to apples tests is over 20% difference in most cases. That is BADDDDDDD.
 
and I bought a bag of hotdogs and buns to celebrate this week...Thanks AMD!

The part that really hurt the most out of the review was the portion where the 980Ti gave the middle finger to the Fury X on BF4. :eek:

Yeah when I got to the BF4 part of the review I thought "Ok, AMD has got this" *scroll down to results* :eek:
 
Thanks for the great and honest review. It was a perfect review, and unf the results were exactly like many expected. I was afraid the numbers would speak exactly like they did. No way around it 4GB is 4GB, And in todays world with console ports, and lazy devs just because the consoles have extra vram to use, and why not just use it for the sack of using it. 4GB of ram on a card just doesn't work very well at high resolutions.

I was really hoping that AMD could knock this out of the park, to very least push Nvidia. Seems that Nvidia knew exactly what they needed in performance when they released the 980 TI. I think AMD needed to release the Fury X at a lower price point, then we would be talking. Fury X at max $550.
 
Not a good week for AMD. This reminds me of nVidia's Geforce 5800 launch so hopefully AMD can rebound from this just like nVidia did.
 
This was exactly what I figured. They were hiding benchmarks and pushing this thing back because they just managed to match a vanilla 980, but did it almost a year later and with super expensive memory. Poor AMD. They just can't catch a break.
 
Fury X can only overclock 5-10%, Ti can reach 30%. Check other reviews. Overclocking won't save the Fury X.

Nope - 980 ti has around 20% of overclocking headroom, Fury X at the moment hits maybe 10% so it's even worse.

OT- I'd at least upgrade to 290/390/970 level card instead of sitting on 6970.

Thanks, I hadn't had time to check out any other reviews. I will later, but [H] is always the first stop since you know you'll get it without any BS. [H] is the Dragnet of hardware reviews... "Just the facts, ma'am."

Honestly, I'm still on 1080p since I game on my TV. If/when that ever goes away it'll likely be replaced by 4K, so I really will be holding on until the next generation. But I never know for sure. Something used or clearance might come along that I just can't pass up.
 
get your 980 ti before they go up in price with everyone jumping ship

Doubt this would happen. If anything, due to weak sales, I see Fury X dropping in price relatively soon. It would probably go down to GTX980 levels and compete there.
 
TBH i'm dissaponted in this release by AMD and by all the hype they generated. This isn't the first time they do it with one of their products and quite frankly don't see why exactly. All in all, Fury X is a decent card but not at it's current price point and definitely not for 4k as it was hyped up to be.

This gen of cards is bad for AMD, high prices compared to the performance they offer...

Also thanks guys for not sugar coating anything, altho the numbers speak for themselves. Another great review!
 
Wow, this is much worse than I expected.
Can their gfx dept survive this?
Perhaps other reviews will con enough people into buying one, it would be a disaster to lose NVidias only competition.

Again [H], thanks for revealing the true story.
 
i bet you AMD put all their eggs in one basket again and is betting everything on DX12.
They should've just waited another month for windows 10 and shown it in the best possible light.

Also saying it's an overclockers dream but having the voltage locked ? say whatt... are they smoking....
 
All in all, Fury X is a decent card but not at it's current price point and definitely not for 4k as it was hyped up to be.

Beats the 980ti in games I play at my resolution so I guess I am happy with it.:D
 
Not a good week for AMD. This reminds me of nVidia's Geforce 5800 launch so hopefully AMD can rebound from this just like nVidia did.

It's more like the 2900 XT release: new tech with hefty memory bandwidth, but very late, overpriced, and underwhelming performance.
 
Great review! Best part for me was the 4k section in the conclusion. Everybody needs to get off the hype train about 4k.
 
i bet you AMD put all their eggs in one basket again and is betting everything on DX12.
They should've just waited another month for windows 10 and shown it in the best possible light.

Also saying it's an overclockers dream but having the voltage locked ? say whatt... are they smoking....

Assuming they could manage a working driver in time, that scenario could have worked.

But there should be no excuses when you launch a product. The drivers should be as good as possible.
 
So, Fury = Fail, eh? Okay, that's a bit harsh; the card just about matches the competition.

I hope that when you come to testing overclocking (I expect you didn't have time), you will also test it against a 980 Ti or TX with a fluid cooler like EVGA's.
 
Beats the 980ti in games I play at my resolution so I guess I am happy with it.:D

And what are those resolutions, can you please care to share. I haven't seen FuryX beating the Ti at even lower resolutions.
 
No HDMI 2.0? Couldn't even like it if I wanted to. My setup requires that.
 
Thanks [H] for the honest review.

Too bad the competition from Fury wasn't as strong as what many had hoped for.
 
Fury X can only overclock 5-10%, Ti can reach 30%. Check other reviews. Overclocking won't save the Fury X.

If eventual voltage tweaking doesn't open up higher levels of overclocking, AMD is going to need to drop the price of this thing to $500 to compete. And even if it does overclock decently, it's still going to need to be about $550.
 
As expected. Games aren't significantly held back by Memory Bandwidth, and those that are would typically be held back also by 4GB VRAM. AMD improved the WRONG THING. Shader performance matters more, and NVIDIA maintains it's edge.

It's a solid card, but the 980 Ti renders it DoA.
 
If eventual voltage tweaking doesn't open up higher levels of overclocking, AMD is going to need to drop the price of this thing to $500 to compete. And even if it does overclock decently, it's still going to need to be about $550.

But can they make a profit at that price? HBM is expensive right now, and they may lose money at that price point. A price drop is NOT guaranteed.
 
I expected this, although I was hoping it would be slightly more competitive. AMD is idiotic not pricing this lower, although I wager the bill of materials is higher for this than the Geforce 980 TI, with the fancy HBM and liquid cooling. They may not have much room on pricing.
 
5-8 fps on those apples to apples tests is over 20% difference in most cases. That is BADDDDDDD.

No, no it isn't. There's no 8 fps difference, and in the one game that the difference is 5 fps, the the percentage is 8%.

Underwhelming results non the less.
 
Wow I honestly thought AMD was gonna bring something strong to the table, especially considering their "leaked" benchmarks. I've stopped listening to marketing a while back thankfully, but this whole misleading "built for 4k gaming" bit has to stop.
 
I only read the apples to apples and I saw the Fury X match or be within 5-8 FPS of the 980 Ti on Min and AVG for pretty much all games. Wattage was within 20 watts and it was 25 degrees cooler. For the same price as the 980 Ti I'd say this is alright. It doesn't blow the 980 Ti out of the water but it runs cooler and doesn't cost more.

Just FYI, the Fury X was running cooler only because it's a watercooling vs Air on a 980Ti. In some ways the Fury X is actually cheaper than a 980Ti because a Hybrid 980Ti is $750. So via an actual Apples to Apples comparison the furyX is probably more of a $550 card w/o the water cooling solution since the AIO coolers generally run an extra $100 on top.

But yeah that review is exactly what I was expecting. There is just no way you can consider HBM a cache. The ONLY way 4GB could be used in the manner they implied is with direct developer intervention. It's not going to be able to be done as solely a driver optimization, it would have to be implemented specifically by the game developer. Yes the driver is the one that allocates the video card storage, but it is the game engine that is telling it what it needs to have in that memory.

In the end Fury X really looks like a stop gap card. If AMD survives this then maybe the next one with 8GB will be the one that everyone expected this one to be.

Great review [H].
 
Assuming they could manage a working driver in time, that scenario could have worked.

But there should be no excuses when you launch a product. The drivers should be as good as possible.

390x beat the 980 with launch driver.
that the fury x have results all over the place is due to imature drivers understandable as its new arc and tech under it which the 390x didnt have in the same way.

And what are those resolutions, can you please care to share. I haven't seen FuryX beating the Ti at even lower resolutions.

always a sceptic.:D

2l8c5t0.jpg
 
AMD fell short on this one ,i doubt i`m the only one who expected this HBM tech to bring some super GPU , but fact is they still cant keep up with Nvidia.

cant see any logic in getting this card instead of the Ti at the same price and the usual better performance for lower wattage.

if AMD cant compete with performance , they should lower prices , period.
 
390x beat the 980 with launch driver.
that the fury x have results all over the place is due to imature drivers understandable as its new arc and tech under it which the 390x didnt have in the same way.



always a sceptic.:D

2l8c5t0.jpg

Can you please point our the source of that article. I haven't seen FuryX beating the 980 Ti in any of the BF4 benchmarks so far.
 
It doesn't require it. It just feels pointless though. At the moment at least you can hardly overclock the card, the idle noise is bad and it just makes the thing even more expensive. I'm actually quite surprised why they added that water cooler... Okay, temps are nice but what's the point when you can't seem to make use of that cooler?


Even if the card doesn't require the water cooling, it's nice being able to dump the GPU heat outside of the computer case instead of having it preheat the air cooling the CPU. I just added an AIO cooler to my video card and it allowed me to turn down both my case fans and the fans on my AIO cooling the CPU, getting better temps and much quieter in the process.
 
Looking at the guru3d review the Fury X is looking much more positive tbh, matching the 980Ti at 4K, and only slightly behind at lower resolutions.
 
Why are all of the reviews showing completely different results? Almost every site is saying something different. Well the ones I have been on anyway.

All of them are pretty disappointing imho but the discrepancy across the review sites is strange.
 
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

sorry just had to let that one out.

Careful, things are a bit touchy in AMD land right now. But HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... oh that feels better. It's not good to hold in such good laughter.

Is this a repeat of the 2900 where a lot of people said AMD would trash nVidia? I was honestly expecting more, but all the signs were there. I can't believe I got sucked into the hype. I spent way too much time in the "Fury is coming in a few weeks" thread.
 
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But can they make a profit at that price? HBM is expensive right now, and they may lose money at that price point. A price drop is NOT guaranteed.

Right, that's the rub. They were hoping to be in competition with the Titan X where they would have much more pricing leeway, but the 980 Ti shot that plan all to hell.
 
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