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

AndrewK78 said:
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.
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if the games they are benching don't have a built in benchmark, then the review sites end up doing their own in-game bench methodology which can wildly vary between different sites
 
AndrewK78 said:
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.
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Depends on the games used, and some sites (like techreport) are only using 4k, where the Fury has pretty much the same performance as the 980ti...
 
gamerk2 said:
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.
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As others have said, the big difference in price right now is the cooling system.
 
Ouch! That was close to what I expected, But I thought it would at'least trade punches with the 980 Ti, It looks like AMD users would be best off buying a 290X-8GB/390X. I was also hoping the Fury X would surprise me. We need the price race. But it looks like once again Nvidia still has no competition. (Unless AMD prices the cards right) I suppose the Fury X is still cool to look at LOL. I am glad I did not wait and got the 970!
 
Brent: great review, too bad you guys weren't able to show it in a better light. I had high hopes for this card and while I'm not totally disappointed (great cooling, great efficiency ) I'm struggling to find it's saving grace when compared to the competition. Is there a saving grace to the Fury X?
 
I think I had already decided to go with a 980-Ti but the price of them in the UK is ridiculous (about £600).. so I held out wondering what the Fury and 390X would bring. I cant remember when top end cards cost so much!

I wasnt happy with AMD anyway due to my Crossfire 280X cards suffering from the classic flashy texture problem in BF4 so that was another reason to jump ship to Nvidia (not that there are not SLI probs either mind you.. so I wanted a single card that could perform at 1440).

In the end I decided not to wait for AMD and Fury or the 390X after the poor reviews and bought a SuperJetStream overclocked 980 for just £379 on overclockers in the UK... that's a huge discount on the £600 980Ti and when I play BF4 now at 2560x1440 (all ultra) I get between 90 and 100 FPS thanks to its huge overclock.... which is about what a 980Ti gets too so Im well pleased.

So AMD just didnt do enough to keep me as a customer. Im glad I didnt wait for Fury. And most of my switch is down to their crappy crossfire drivers for BF4. My 280X cards are now ebayed.

Thanks for the review [H]. Solid and Honest to the core as always.
 
Lol, what is this shit. Seriously that's all AMD could muster up...what a joke. Way too late to even matter, even if it's impressive in some ways compared to the 290x. Just not worth it.

Only thing I found really odd in the review was using D3D in BF4 instead of Mantle, all other reviews seemed to use Mantle and It performed much better. Any reason why?
 
In the UK, it seems that the Fury X, price-wise, sits in between the 980 and 980Ti, so it is appropriately placed in that market.
It seems to be a different story in the US though.
 
I wake up to this... RIP AMD. I hope you guys survive until the die shrink. This generation is done.

Edit: For those who still want Fury X..wait a few months for discounts.
 
Trimlock said:
Brent: great review, too bad you guys weren't able to show it in a better light. I had high hopes for this card and while I'm not totally disappointed (great cooling, great efficiency ) I'm struggling to find it's saving grace when compared to the competition. Is there a saving grace to the Fury X?
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I guess that it sort of matches the 980ti while also double precision capable but so far that appears to be useless for gaming. It also appears as if it needs better drivers like the 7970 did but that is not a guarantee.
 
I will say, I'm loving the scope of the design, small pcb and a fan you can place for optimum air flow for small form factors.
 
AndrewK78 said:
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.
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Keep in mind that we use REAL WORLD GAMING. No benchmarks. We have seen in the past where gaming and benchmark data in the same gave showed deltas of up to 20% in FPS.
 
rumartinez89 said:
I guess that it sort of matches the 980ti while also double precision capable but so far that appears to be useless for gaming. It also appears as if it needs better drivers like the 7970 did but that is not a guarantee.
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It's a Tonga with 4096 SP. It's not a new architecture so I don't buy the driver immaturity argument.
 
One thing about HardCop is they are always truthful and can be trusted! So Fanboys can't possibly cry lie.
 
Oh god. The last paragraph. Brutal honesty, I love it.

If prices drop it'd be tempting to use in my relative's PCs for fun. I usually do mini-ITX builds for them and enjoy some thermal headroom since they never clean anything.
 
rumartinez89 said:
I guess that it sort of matches the 980ti while also double precision capable but so far that appears to be useless for gaming. It also appears as if it needs better drivers like the 7970 did but that is not a guarantee.
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The performance thing I'm not upset about, it's close enough for me to not care. I'm not sold on driver optimizations unless they develop some sort of memory flush to better use the smaller memory pool.

What I'm scratching my head about is the same number of ROPs and an insane amount of texture units...
 
Cyph said:
It's a Tonga with 4096 SP. It's not a new architecture so I don't buy the driver immaturity argument.
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Thats what I think too! Like a re-brand 7990 but instead of two GPU's they somehow got it inside one chip. Or maybe they placed them close to each other and covered the chips, Could explain the big size.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Only thing I found really odd in the review was using D3D in BF4 instead of Mantle, all other reviews seemed to use Mantle and It performed much better. Any reason why?
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As of late, we have gotten better performance with DX rather than Mantle. We have gone back and forth on which API we have used depending on which generated a better gaming experience.
 
Cyph said:
It's a Tonga with 4096 SP. It's not a new architecture so I don't buy the driver immaturity argument.
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don't know about it being 100% Tonga

Fury X has pretty similar fill rate to Hawaii

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285 Tonga with its 32 ROPs beats Hawaii with its 64 ROPs here

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It does look a lot like immature drivers. Historically almost every release was faster with more mature drivers. Was BF4 also tested in Mantle or just DX11>?
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
Without 6 months of hype, and maybe launching a few weeks earlier, this card would have been perceived much better. Always the uphill battle for AMD.
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It's an uphill battle because AMD decided to make it an uphill battle. Between the refreshes, and this uncompetitive part, AMD as a company seems to be on a suicide mission. Imagine if back in 2008 when AMD released the Radeon 4870 with a price matching the GTX260($450), it would have been a joke. Instead AMD released the 4870 at LESS THAN HALF the price of the top of the line GTX280($650), and at $300 was competitive enough to make nVidia's products look overpriced, to the point that nVidia had to send out rebate checks.

Fiji-XT should have been an air-cooled card for $500, that wiped the floor with the GTX980 and was competitive with the GTX980-Ti in most games and in a choice few kept up with the Titan-X. Basically, a repeat of the Radeon 4870 from 2008. Instead AMD has is wildly over-valuing their products, which not only destroys marketshare, but more importantly mindshare.

Taking price out of the equation the 2008 Radeon 4870 and 2015 Fury-X are perfect parallels for each other. New Memory for a GPU of it's time? Check. Brand new and improved die? Check.

Priced right, AMD's latest line-up could have crushed whatever nVidia had. The Fury-X should have been $500. The 390x should have been $380, the 390 should have been $280, the 280 should have been $200.

I've always said, I'd work for AMD to help fix their stupid prices, but at this point it seems that the company is on a suicide mission, something I'd like to avoid.
 
Udgnim said:
don't know about it being 100% Tonga

Fury X has pretty similar fill rate to Hawaii
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So GCN 1.1 confirmed? Lack of HDMI 2.0 points to no R&D on this. This just shows that it's probably not even Tonga but probably Hawaii. Disappointing.
 
Cyph said:
So GCN 1.1 confirmed? Lack of HDMI 2.0 points to no R&D on this. This just shows that it's probably not even Tonga but probably Hawaii. Disappointing.
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There's quite a bit of R&D put into this. New memory controller, increased SP, TU and much better power management.
 
Quartz-1 said:
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.
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At $650 it's a failure the same way the Radeon 2900xt was a failure. If it were priced at $500, it would have been a success the way the Radeon 4870 was a success. AMD knew this, and still priced it (and the rest of their "new" line up) unrealistically high.
 
Cyph said:
It's a Tonga with 4096 SP. It's not a new architecture so I don't buy the driver immaturity argument.
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According the [H] it is an updated tonga or GCN 1.3 so that argument does hold even if it is rather weak. They do list a couple of "improvements" compared to 1.2 such as floating point instructions and other stuff like that.
 
So, this is even more of an indication that the card's performance is slow because of immature drivers.
 
The Best F***ing Review to date.

You guys covered all fronts, 1440p users, 4K users, DP users and HDMI 2.0 users.
AMD came up short on everything and you guys told it like it was!

That's why I come here first. Great job Brent and Kyle.

As for the gaming industry, this is a sad day. Yes I use Nvidia because the incompetence of AMD.
I wanted Fury to beat the Titan X to lower prices, but AMD just turned over the keys to Nvidia.

Samsung, where are you? AMD has something they would like to sell. Their GPU division.
 
I'm surprised they left the ROPs alone. More shaders and texture mappers is nice but unless they did some IPC improvements in the ROPs its not looking good there. Not updating the HDMI is also strange - what technical reason could possibly account for that?

That strategic launch nVidia did with the 980ti makes a lot more sense now. Seems like they got wind that Fury was going to have a "meh" launch and decided to cannibalize the early summer sales.

I agree with Kyle and Brent's sentiment that this feels like a proof-of-concept for HBM and that a midrange introduction might have been a better idea. But with AMD's seemingly limited R&D resources these days that would probably leave us with a midrange card with new tech and the last-gen flashship still holding the top spot. At least in the current situation AMD has a new top-dog, even if it doesn't put up the numbers many people were hoping for.

Also seems like AMD's drivers are still leaving performance on the table. Waiting on DX12 to solve their problems is just lame and does nothing for the library of DX11 games that will continue to be released into the early days of DX12.

If they brought this in at $550 with an air cooled version at $450 and the 390x rebadge at $350 they might have shaken up the market a bit.
 
Why didn't they up the ROPS????

Makes no sense.

If they up the ROPS and the RAM, I bet this thing would be a screamer.

Not sure why they marketed it for 4k either. Like the review said, it just isn't enough.

Witcher 3, even at only 1080p with not everything maxed out, uses almost 3GB.

Still a pretty large jump over the 290x.
 
Complete flop, and I was genuinely hoping this was competitive. The way AMD slowly fed us info to build up hype makes this even more disappointing. 290X was a great card and gave Titan a run for its money. It looks like AMD is really falling behind this time...
 
Imhotep said:
So, this is even more of an indication that the card's performance is slow because of immature drivers.
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I get tired of seeing posts like this so as to give an excuse or a crutch to new GPUs. The fact is that this is what you get when you buy this card TODAY.

That said, one of the reasons you don't see us put together the huge comparison graphs like other sites is because we RE-TEST with every new driver that comes out to show the hardware in its best light. Yes, we hope drivers mature, and performance scales better in future driver releases. Quite frankly, this is expected from us, not looked at as if the driver is currently holding the GPU back.

So you can put whatever label you want on the driver to make an excuse for performance, but the fact of the matter is that the performance is what it is today. Shit in one hand, hope in the other. See which fills up first.
 
Evidently at least one retailer already dropped the price 100$ (Tiger direct) as seen on the [H] Hot deals section.

Oh well, hanging onto the r9 290 a little longer. Maybe back to team green and my handle's namesake next crop of cards :)
 
geforce man said:
Evidently at least one retailer already dropped the price 100$ (Tiger direct) as seen on the [H] Hot deals section.

Oh well, hanging onto the r9 290 a little longer. Maybe back to team green and my handle's namesake next crop of cards :)
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mgulbran said:
Nothing a price drop can't fix. I think the only issue is that it is priced too high.
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If this is right on pricing at Tiger Direct, this makes a LOT more sense when coming to a buying decision.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1866501
 
mgulbran said:
Nothing a price drop can't fix. I think the only issue is that it is priced too high.
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AMD would probably argue it's priced too low.
SFF, watercooler, HBM.

Prices will drop because they are wrong and they have no other choice. They claimed they didn't want to be "the cheap solution" and they failed to deliver.
Their press packet benchmarks were a lie, they lied at E3 too.
 
I feel more better about my $232 R9 290x purchase every day :) It's about 36% faster than my old 7970. Decent upgrade to bridge me until they get their shit together.
 
mgulbran said:
Nothing a price drop can't fix. I think the only issue is that it is priced too high.
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And it has 4GB and it it doesnt perform well enough (compared to 980ti) and it has HDMI 1.4 and it has no DL DVI.
Its not worthy of being a flagship card designed for 4K. Its not good enough for 1440p in some games and cant be used with many high Hz 1440p displays.
A competitor to the 980 at best.
 
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