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

aop said:
AMD has massive driver overhead compared to NVIDIA and [H] is using OC'd 3770K instead of something super expensive like OC'd Haswell-E.

This might explain the poor results in [H] benchmarks. If you are selecting a GPU and have weaker CPU like old Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge then [H] benchmark offers more accurate picture of the performance you would receive from new GPU.
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We have seen ZERO issues to move away from our 4.8GHz clocked 3770K. If you can show me actual proof to back up your statements, I would LOVE to see that. Otherwise you are just talking out of your ass.
 
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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Personally i think that argument holds no water. You'd think that gpu vendors would want to get good performance out of their cards when they're first released and reviewed. And considering amd's lack of drivers since the start of the year (comparatively speaking) i think most people were under the assumption they were busy tuning drivers for fury.

If they were and this is the fruits of their labour then its a lemon. Not forgetting that amd still don't have crossfire enabled freesync drivers either, last ii heard they were meant to be out around april\may time.

Yes drivers will bring incremental improvements over time but that's the case for pretty much any card.
 
aop said:
AMD has massive driver overhead compared to NVIDIA and [H] is using OC'd 3770K instead of something super expensive like OC'd Haswell-E.

This might explain the poor results in [H] benchmarks. If you are selecting a GPU and have weaker CPU like old Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge then [H] benchmark offers more accurate picture of the performance you would receive from new GPU.
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The performance difference in IPC between Ivybridge and Haswell is maybe 10% at best. At 4.8GHz, that's negligible.
 
mgulbran said:
Pardon my ignorance but I thought they were planning on releasing a card without the AIO cooler. Also I don't think it is free, I think the cooler cost about $100.

Again just my perspective.
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It's free to the buyer if it's included, whether or not they wanted it. As I said, it will bump the cost up for AMD to manufacture, but the buyer just wants a card, they aren't active looking to spend extra on watercooling with the Fury X necessarily, but they have no choice because the card doesn't work without one.
 
Well, this wasn't what I was hoping for.

But I agree with your conclusion, unfortunately, particularly around marketing. Selling a $429 card with 8GB VRAM and then selling a $649 card with 4GB VRAM is confusing. It makes me think that the only reason they included the 8GB of RAM on the 390 series is to sell it to the uninformed, because those cards are not powerful enough to use the extra VRAM. It would have been much smarter - in my opinion - to sell those cards with 4GB at a lower price and lower power consumption. It would have benefited end users, especially when the competition also has only 4GB at that price point.

HBM maybe should have sat out a round until 2016, at least on the high end. The tech is extremely promising but 4GB isn't enough when you have this level of performance and can actually drive high settings at >1440p. I really think the product stack should have been a scaled up Tonga with HBM, to provide the GCN 1.2 improvements across the entire lineup and for SFF, and then Fiji with 8GB GDDR5. I'm not really sure how the current direction was decided upon. My guess is simply R&D budget.
 
aop said:
AMD has massive driver overhead compared to NVIDIA and [H] is using OC'd 3770K instead of something super expensive like OC'd Haswell-E.

This might explain the poor results in [H] benchmarks. If you are selecting a GPU and have weaker CPU like old Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge then [H] benchmark offers more accurate picture of the performance you would receive from new GPU.
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.....no. Even 2600k @ 4.8 is still not a bottleneck. The differences in minimum frame rates in benchmarks in CPU reviews are negated by overclocking.
 
Michaelius said:
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.
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The 980 Ti has 50% overclock headroom, not 20%. Its base Boost clock is 1075 MHz, and people have been getting 1500 MHz or higher.

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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It's the 2900XT all over again. Next thing you know people will start saying that this card was made for DX12.
Flexmaster said:
I'm not too worried about ATI the theoretical performance is there and everything looks great on paper and DX10 games aren't even out yet (That is the #1 reason most of us are getting these 8800's and the x2900...it seems like you guys keep forgeting)

Anyway I think its too soon to say that they failed it was just released for petes sake. A couple of driver revisions and DX10 games and performance between the 8800's and the latest ATI's will be right there.
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Angelus897 said:
Except by the time DX10 will be the norm, we will be in the 2nd or 3rd generation of DX10 cards. Also, ATI fans had to wait 7 months, and now they have to wait even longer for the performance to catch up?
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Let's not forget that by the time AMD squeezed performance out of the 290X to match the 780 Ti that Maxwell GM204 chips had already been released.
Remon said:
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...
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shad0w4life said:
It's crazy reading other reviews eg TPU has Civ V, Dead Rising 3 on it and shows Fury X trouncing 980Ti in those as two examples be it stock benchies but it's curious. And other ones had games like Bioshock and Metro doing well yada yada.

Someone give H Moar monies so we can get more games included. I play none of the ones used, where's the Skyrim & Civ V benchies :D

I'm not sure if it's as DOA as made out to be, the 980Ti compared to it is pumping out some room heating air, where's all the guys claiming to live in Florida now and needing the coldest possible card.
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If you read the FCAT results in the Tech report review you'll see that the frame times are a lot worse than the 980 Ti. So yes, it can keep up with the 980 Ti in raw framerate, but the experience is going to be worse due to stuttering that may be due to only having 4GB of VRAM.
 
Man I'm bummed. With all the leaks of this thing running multiple 4k monitors I was sure it could tackle a single 1440p@144hz. They even mentioned 5k at paper launch. Now I have to figure out what to buy. Stick to my guns and go AMD because I disagree with nVidia and their proprietary tech or just bite the bullet and get the better card, 980ti...
 
I am so dissapointed. This is the kind of performance numbers I was expecting from Fury Nano or air cooled Fury, not their watercooled flagship. I am sick of Nvidias crap and I was hoping AMD would bring a kick ass card that makes me want to move back to Team Red after being in Team Green for 3 cards in a row. Considering 300 serie being rebrands and Fury being so underwhelming I doubt I can snatch a good deal on used 290X either.

Mind you this obviously not a bad card, just a terribly overpriced one. Unless the drivers are incredibly immature and in future there will be a huge performance jump (or it overclocks like mofo) the 650$ is way too fricking much for a card that barely keeps up with normal GTX980 as it is. They should have thrown the watercooler away and design a good air cooler and price it around the same as 980, maybe bit less. Who cares if it would run hot then. About 80C on high performance card is pretty much the norm for GPU's these days anyway.
 
Good review Kyle! Its nice to see you guys looked into the 4gb limit, will there be any more info on that in the future?
 
This truly is a disappointment. I was really hoping for AMD to drive a slum-dunk down the court, but meh. I really wanted to pick up a Fury X and an ASUS MG279Q 1440p IPS Freesync. G-Sync's premium price is just too much for me.

Maybe i'll see a 390X & the monitor, or wait until the Fury X drops in price.
 
Rizen said:
Well, this wasn't what I was hoping for.

But I agree with your conclusion, unfortunately, particularly around marketing. Selling a $429 card with 8GB VRAM and then selling a $649 card with 4GB VRAM is confusing. It makes me think that the only reason they included the 8GB of RAM on the 390 series is to sell it to the uninformed, because those cards are not powerful enough to use the extra VRAM. It would have been much smarter - in my opinion - to sell those cards with 4GB at a lower price and lower power consumption. It would have benefited end users, especially when the competition also has only 4GB at that price point.

HBM maybe should have sat out a round until 2016, at least on the high end. The tech is extremely promising but 4GB isn't enough when you have this level of performance and can actually drive high settings at >1440p. I really think the product stack should have been a scaled up Tonga with HBM, to provide the GCN 1.2 improvements across the entire lineup and for SFF, and then Fiji with 8GB GDDR5. I'm not really sure how the current direction was decided upon. My guess is simply R&D budget.
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AMD might have expected 20nm to be viable for GPU production and expected that DDR5 speed would become a limiting factor and decided to target HBM
 
Brent/Kyle,

If the vram situation was reversed so to speak, the 390x having the 4GB HBM at its lower price point, and the Fury having 8GB of the fastest GDDR5 do you think it would have made a big difference?
 
gamerk2 said:
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.
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This is my biggest question to amd.

I imagine the engineers at amd would know whether or not if their gpu is bandwidth limited and if it would have any real world benefit to using HBM. Hell how many of us armchair gpu engineers could have told you that there was almost no benefit to increased memory speed?

If they didn't see any real world benefit why the FUCK would they use it instead of just sticking with gddr5? HBM is expensive and their implementation limited, then including a aio cooler on top of it i imagine this card isn't cheap to make.The card is a fantastic deal when you look at the sum of it's parts but no one judges gpus on that, only performance matters not gimmicks.

Someone at amd needs to answer for the outright awful decision making that went into this card because all i see is a waste of resources at every turn.
 
Simmonz said:
If the extra VRAM the 980 Ti has was so needed why was the 4K apples to apples a wash ? Why didn't the 980 Ti make huge gains on FPS ? 1-5 FPS is blowing the Fury X out of the water ?
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the 4GB is fine. To push past 4GB usage you will be going into areas the cards with more VRAM cant even manage well. It's sad [H] failed to realize or test this.

The choice of games is suspect but I think these guys lean more towards gameworks is ok and its AMDs fault if it hurts them than anything else.
 
I didn't expect much more from the first iteration...at the moment. It'll be interesting to see how much headroom is left to be uncovered by driver improvements... Of the two products @ $649, no question the Fury is the more interesting...

Query: Where's the overclocking section...? AMD said it was "an overclocker's dream"...
 
KickAssCop said:
Underwhelmed by AMD as always. Now 4th year in a row.
Can't even begin to explain how fast I am losing faith in this company.

Should have priced it at 550 bucks and called it a day.
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I agree. Even if it were priced at something like 579-599 it would've been more competitive.
 
Just stop the trolling statements, REMOVED - Kyle

To Hard, thank you, over the 15 years I have frequented this site, you have never led me astray. Out of all the review sites I have always felt this one has the least product bias.

Sadly, the Fury X is a flop, but the architecture is there for something that could be amazing, hopefully either AMD or Nvidia will push us to that next step. Competition is good, I have no desire to see just Nvidia as a GPU manufacturer.
 
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Armenius said:
If you read the FCAT results in the Tech report review you'll see that the frame times are a lot worse than the 980 Ti. So yes, it can keep up with the 980 Ti in raw framerate, but the experience is going to be worse due to stuttering that may be due to only having 4GB of VRAM.
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This is sort of an aside, but I would like to touch on this. If you want to discuss in depth, PM me.

We had an FCAT setup and decided that it was of no value to us in our reviews, and here is why.

1. FCAT is tremendously resource intensive. Gather solid data, analyzing the data, and displaying the data in a meaningful way takes an incredible amount of time and we did not feel as though it was worth it. Keep in mind that NVIDIA's original motivation behind FCAT was HardOCP's testing. NVIDIA came to us and asked us to be involved in its development from the ground up. Even at that time, we did not see the return on investment for all the work that would need to be put into it to make it a viable tool. We declined.

2. We do not need the FCAT tool to tell us whether or not a game has a smooth fluid feel that does not break the immersion of gameplay. What FCAT does is assign an objective value to that feeling. I personally did not want to break that gameplay quality down to a metric. You either get smooth framerates or you do not. When that quality is not there in our gameplay experiences, we explain this to our readers. I think assigning a metric to compare are great from a scientific approach, but honestly that is not what gamers are looking for. Gamers want to know what kind of experience they will have.
 
I feel the review is honest. Maybe a little harsh, but clearly labels the ups and downs of the card.

4k performance is good, not quite 980ti or Titan X. Definately a solid card 650$ feels ok, since it is liquid cooled. If it came with some craptastic cooler then 650 would be to high of a price.

The unknown is how it will overclock once voltage tweaks are out. Not sure if Dx 12 will do anything to change the picture either.

I feel AMD's driver team is partly to blame for its weak performance against the 980 ti, but that's part of the game. Hopefully they address the driver department and release regular non beta updates.

I'm not in a market for a graphics card atm. I am happy to sit out and just watch the bicker war. I'm waiting for 14nm cards.
 
semitope said:
the 4GB is fine. To push past 4GB usage you will be going into areas the cards with more VRAM cant even manage well. It's sad [H] failed to realize or test this.

The choice of games is suspect but I think these guys lean more towards gameworks is ok and its AMDs fault if it hurts them than anything else.
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What about the vram and over 4gb and allocation, I would like you to explain that a bit more because I don't see that at all....... The H review used the best selling games right now in different genres
 
semitope said:
the 4GB is fine. To push past 4GB usage you will be going into areas the cards with more VRAM cant even manage well. It's sad [H] failed to realize or test this.

The choice of games is suspect but I think these guys lean more towards gameworks is ok and its AMDs fault if it hurts them than anything else.
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We learn toward new games, and games people are playing, period. I don't care about if the developer chose nvidia created 3d effects or amd created 3d effects, as long as it has some 3d effects! Talk to the developer if you aren't happy with their choices in implementing features in their own game.

That 4GB is really going to put the squeeze on when you combine multiple cards in CrossFire. The performance to run high settings will be there, and the capacity further strained.
 
LOLOL see I told you guys....AMD is dead....RIP


Fanboy statements REMOVED - Kyle
 
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Brent/Kyle, I'm curious if AMD indicated architecturally what the double precision performance is (ie. what is theoretically possible, not necessarily the limit for the consumer model)?
 
SilverSliver said:
Sounds like the 980 Ti wrecks Fury X at 4k in Project Cars.

I cannot believe that AMD guy got up on stage at E3 and said that Fury was an overclocking monster with a straight face.
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His exact words were "You’ll be able to overclock this thing like no tomorrow” - AMD CTO Joe Macri said at the card's unveiling. “This is an overclocker’s dream.” Then they proceeded to show graphs with a measly 100Mhz OC.

The reason Big Maxwell runs so cool is that it's powerful enough to win even while underclocked/undervolted. Once you start actually pushing the silicon with a decent OC it eats about as much power as GCN but it just destroys it in terms of performance. 40-50% OC is a reasonable expectation from that chip, whereas AMD seems to be practically maxing out their silicon at the factory just to be able to keep up.
 
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w00t69 said:
I agree. Even if it were priced at something like 579-599 it would've been more competitive.
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I think that's what will eventually happen. Move the 390x down to 970 prices and then move this down to 980 prices and they'll be much more competitive and viable as alternatives. But 980 Ti prices but 20+% less performance ain't gonna cut it. Man this is disappointing as hell.
 
Brent_Justice said:
We learn toward new games, and games people are playing, period. I don't care about if the developer chose nvidia created 3d effects or amd created 3d effects, as long as it has some 3d effects! Talk to the developer if you aren't happy with their choices in implementing features in their own game.

That 4GB is really going to put the squeeze on when you combine multiple cards in CrossFire. The performance to run high settings will be there, and the capacity further strained.
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It looks like GameWorks is working as intended... Well done, Nvidia.
 
I'm sorry to say this but AMD is a sinking ship taking on water more and more as the months go on. It's been said before to death but this ices the deal for me. How in the fuck do they drop the ball on this? When they needed a win so badly? 4 gigs of vram on your flagship card and you yell from the mountain tops about how this is THE DEFACTO card for 4k gaming? at 649.00??? GTFO seriously. Terribad management just bad.

I'm sorry I just had to get that off my chest. I have no desire to see AMD die but the writing is on the wall. RIP.
 
I'm curious as to why some people are claiming that DX12 will improve the performance of this GPU. Isn't DX12 about improving CPU usage?
 
Mister E said:
Brent/Kyle,

If the vram situation was reversed so to speak, the 390x having the 4GB HBM at its lower price point, and the Fury having 8GB of the fastest GDDR5 do you think it would have made a big difference?
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The 390X does not truly have the GPU power to utilize the 8GB VRAM footprint in single GPU configuration. From our Dying Light results it seems as though the Fury X might very well have the GPU power to use more VRAM.

What will truly paint a picture about these VRAM configurations is when we get solid and scaling CrossFire configurations running on the test bench.

All that said, the 390X seems as though it could be price positioned much better with 4GB on the reference card. AIBs could build 8GB cards for those wanting to use that GPU in CrossFire. Obviously you will not be seeing AIBs building 8GB Fury X cards....
 
Hornet said:
I'm curious as to why some people are claiming that DX12 will improve the performance of this GPU. Isn't DX12 about improving CPU usage?
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No its both. Youre able to draw twice the calls with DX12 vs 11, which is primarily GPU intensive.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Wasn't talked about
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thanks

Hornet said:
I'm curious as to why some people are claiming that DX12 will improve the performance of this GPU. Isn't DX12 about improving CPU usage?
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The theory is that AMDs rendering pipeline has certain efficiency deficiencies compared to Nvidia's (software driver level or perhaps even architecturally) that DX12 might address to better exploit AMDs on paper raw performance (math) advantage.

You see some of this evident in terms of how AMD performance scales between resolutions. And also how it scales between hardware units (core count).
 
They should've gone 8GB GDDR5 for Fiji and saved HBM til their next gen. GDDR5 is not bandwidth constrained on current GPU's. People with Titan X's put a massive overclock on the VRAM and there's no FPS increase. GPU's need to get even faster before HBM matters. Nvidia seems to understand this.

The statement that Kyle and Brent got back from AMD when they asked about the 4GB was cringe worthy, the part about "Well you shouldn't compare GDDR5 and HBM because it's like comparing SSD to a spinning disk". What's AMD thinking?
 
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Overall I'm just happy the thing it out now so I can make a purchase.

Based on what I see here for 3440x1440 gaming I'm going GTX 980 Ti.

Fury looks to be a pretty innovative card, and overall I think it's "neat". But bottom line is performance for my money, and that extra vram, combined with AMD performance woes on recent titles has tilted me to choose the 980 ti.

Good review, and I really do think AMD doesn't have a terrible card here, I'd be interested in the nex evolution of Fiji. I just hope they have the resources to push team green.
 
reviews like this one are the reason i only trust [H] when it comes to hardware evaluation.

well done brent and kyle, as always!

as for AMD ... what a disappointment.
 
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