AMD Fury X Reviews

[Alatar]

I wasn't aware of the manual part. It seems like it would still be accurate since you have to submit proof (of the clocks)? Do you have a source for gpuz reporting the wrong clocks?

It's common knowledge, GPU-Z (the normal gpu-z window) reports the base boost clock instead of the actual clock for any modern NV card without a modded bios. And for the longest time that was used on hwbot as the submission frequency. Now that it's not accurate for NV anymore it depends on the person whether they use the correct clock speed.

The GPU-Z system gets skewed once you do those close to 2ghz OCs. What matters is the air/water range where the actual clocks are often ~150Mhz higher than the ones reported by GPU-Z

I'll try avoid derailing the thread, my point was that fury x has to compete with 980 TI at about 1300 MHz to compete OC vs OC. Anything more is simply winning the silicon lottery (again, unless gpu-z actually does lie).

Simply not correct. A lot of the custom 980Ti models are actually ~1300MHz out of the box.

Like all the maxwell 2.0 cards the best 980Tis reach the high 1500s.

 

[exar333]

RS I have to give you credit. Your stance is exactly the same as always. :thumbsup:

It's a no brainer situation again if you value money over "brand".

Yup.

Unfortunately there a lot of people here with an agenda and they feel the need to recommend based on that rather than objective criticism. *shrug*

 

[Grooveriding]

As far as GM200 overclocks. 1400 is about where you can expect to wind up on most cards when you push them to their limit with stock BIOS, without using a mod to increase voltage. Higher than that is above average and there are cards that are lower. One of my TX only did 1320 with stock BIOS and couldn't break beyond 1400 with 1.3V on a modded BIOS. 1500 is above average.

The problem with reviews on aftermarket cards is that the manufacturer will always send a cherry picked sample because it's an aftermarket card geared to overclocking. It's also important to remember that a lot of people on forums say they have 1500 or 1550, but it's nowhere near stable and you could make the card crash with ease if you stressed it in a bunch of different games. There was a thread on this forum with someone who got a Gigabyte G1 980ti and couldn't crack 1350.

1400 is your average top end clock. Which is still a good increase from the stock boost which I think is 1150 or something ? Using a custom BIOS to get beyond there and give the card 1.28V will get you about another 100 from wherever you top out, unless you have a card that is already amazing and doing 1500. Those cards can't get much higher with more voltage as it seems it hits the limits of the chip around 1600 without getting insane and using hardmods for voltage.

You also can't reasonably run with a 1.28V mod without water cooling or possibly a great aftermarket air cooler with the fan cranked up.

 

[Tovarisc]

Regardless, a good first step by AMD. They now need to rush the 6/8GB version to market, with a slightly uprated base clock, at the same pricing. Pascal is far far away, don't believe the Nvidia hype on that, more than 12 months at this point easily. Perfect for AMD to do a refreshed Fury X that actually delivers on the promises.

On what you base that bolded estimate?

----

Finnish site, Muropaketti, released their review on FuryX if anyone is interested and Chrome's translate function seems to do decent work with turning FIN to ENG; http://muropaketti.com/artikkelit/naytonohjaimet/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-fiji

Reference 980Ti is primary card to which FuryX is compared to. They tested it on 3DMark FS, Battlefield 4 and HL, Crysis 3, ArmA 3, GTAV, Witcher 3, Far Cry 4, Ryse, Project CARS and Dying Light.

 

[Elixer]

Regardless, a good first step by AMD. They now need to rush the 6/8GB version to market, with a slightly uprated base clock, at the same pricing.

Hynix hasn't even started to mass produce HBM2 to get the 8/16/32GB cards out, and won't for a few quarters more.
As far as HBM is concerned, AMD did the best they could with what they got.

 

[Zstream]

Hynix hasn't even started to mass produce HBM2 to get the 8/16/32GB cards out, and won't for a few quarters more.
As far as HBM is concerned, AMD did the best they could with what they got.

Might be off-topic but why can't they utilize increased HBM capacity? It's not like the memory isn't providing enough bandwidth.

It's reminds me of when AMD jumped to 512-bit bus without having the need.
**EDIT**

At least I thought HBM1 rev 2 will have 8GB max?

 

[moonbogg]

As far as GM200 overclocks. 1400 is about where you can expect to wind up on most cards when you push them to their limit with stock BIOS, without using a mod to increase voltage. Higher than that is above average and there are cards that are lower. One of my TX only did 1320 with stock BIOS and couldn't break beyond 1400 with 1.3V on a modded BIOS. 1500 is above average.

This is maxing out the voltage on a program like precision x, right? When you say no voltage mods, the voltage slider on precision X doesn't count as a voltage mod, correct?

 

[railven]

Already sold out and expected to get gouged due to limited supply. :/

In current state it is hard to justify buying this card @ $650, if it climbs to $700 forget about it.

Now the race is really on, impulse buy time.
EVGA 980 Ti Hybrid vs R9 Fury X

 

[Abwx]

Im talking about keeping the same small size as Fury-X with Water. You cannot do that with AIR cooler unless your cooler thickness is double of what your ordinary cards coolers have.

............................

http://www.golem.de/news/radeon-r9-...erg-schlaegt-nvidias-titan-1506-114780-7.html

 

[AnandThenMan]

That [H] review is pure shill.

Witcher 3 with HairWorks, check.
FC4 with Enhanced Godrays, check.
Dying Light, check. (ok fine, but when their list of games is tiny, including a few NV biased titles determines the conclusion)

AMD would actually need Fury X to be 50% faster to compete when its crippled so badly.

Then his GTA V result is out of line against almost every other site. As is the BF4 results.

Compare to other sites that use a lot of games, Fury X matches 980Ti at 1440p/4K. It takes a custom 980Ti to beat it (& those custom 980Ti beats Titan X too).

I expected nothing less from Brent Justice. Not saying Fury X lived up to expectations it did not, although it's still a very good card and runs nearly silent.

 

[Cookie Monster]

It really seems like Maxwell really blindsided AMD here. Perhaps they were thinking that a slightly tweaked GCN and an updated memory interface was enough to take on whatever next from nVIDIA (GK110 was already hitting the physical limit and GCN was competitive with Kepler).

 

[AnandThenMan]

I still think something is holding Fury back, just going by the specs/transistor budget the card should be faster.

 

[Cookie Monster]

I still think something is holding Fury back, just going by the specs/transistor budget the card should be faster.

If you look at the specifications, it should be doubling the performance of tahiti/tonga but we only see this scaling in a few games. Something is definitely holding this back.

Its interesting how unbalanced this GPU is according to TR's synthetic benchs. Perhaps its more suited to future DX12 titles? Meanwhile we can see that Maxwell is pretty balanced for current titles which I think is the most important since by the time DX12 comes in full swing, Pascal and AMD next gen will be around the corner.

 

[JDG1980]

If you look at the specifications, it should be doubling the performance of tahiti/tonga but we only see this scaling in a few games. Something is definitely holding this back.

Its interesting how unbalanced this GPU is according to TR's synthetic benchs. Perhaps its more suited to future DX12 titles? Meanwhile we can see that Maxwell is pretty balanced for current titles which I think is the most important since by the time DX12 comes in full swing, Pascal and AMD next gen will be around the corner.

It's bottlenecked by ROPs. Maxwell has far more ROPs than GCN designs. AMD has been systematically shortchanging their GPUs on this. And they keep pretending that tessellation is some kind of Nvidia dirty trick, rather than an integral part of the DirectX standard.

As TechReport puts it:

"In situations where a game's performance is limited primarily by shader effects processing, texturing, or memory bandwidth, the Fury X should easily outpace the 290X. On the other hand, if gaming performance is gated by any sort of ROP throughput—including raw pixel-pushing power, blending rates for multisampled anti-aliasing, or effects based on depth and stencil like shadowing—the Fury X has little to offer beyond the R9 290X. The same is true for geometry throughput."

When will AMD finally learn that with their tiny market share they can't make the rules, and they have to beat Intel and Nvidia at their own game?

 

[dn7309]

There's are some bid disparity in the reviews out there. Some reviews (HARDOCP) show Fury X getting spanked by Nvidia, While some (like Tomshardware) got Fury X trading blows with 980ti and Titan X

In a few months Fury X will probably beat the Titan X after the drivers get more refinement. Much like the 7970 vs GTX 770, 290X vs GTX 780 and original Titan.

Yes, AMD screwed themselves for their drivers issue. The technology is there to beat anything Nvidia put out already.

 

[.vodka]

Something that got my attention is that AMD went with texturing power on Fiji, meanwhile nV moved away from that particular point in the Kepler -> Maxwell transition, increasing the ROPs.

Gives something to think about. Maybe some less TMUs could've made room for 32 more ROPs and maybe balance the card better, make better use of what HBM offers. The extra efficiency of Tonga's ROPs is seen, but I can't help to think that a few more of these units wouldn't have hurt. I don't know which architecture will do better under DX12.

 

[scooterlibby]

I was hoping for a bit better and my mind wasn't made up until today, but I went with the EVGA 980ti with the ACX cooler. I do love the 'short' water cool design of the Fury. Hopefully their next effort knocks it out of the park. At least, with the 980ti and Fury being so close, we have some competition.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Last I understood voltage didn't give much of a bump with maxwell. Though that was when I was looking at 970s. People weren't even sure they could up the voltage and when they thought they did, progress was minimal. Is the 980Ti Different?

I always hit the power or thermal limits if I mess with voltages. I try to keep it no more than 85c and my top card often sits right at 85c when heavy gaming. It's my mATX mobo and the close proximity of the cards. Definitely not going mATX again, but at the time I was buying this was the best board for the money. The ROG ATX boards weren't available. Oh well.

Anyway yeah I always hit limits, dunno if the 980ti has higher limits before throttling.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Looks like I will either get a 980ti or wait and see what happens with the drivers of the fury as time passes. My card is decent now but getting a bit old so I'm unsure if I should even spend that kind of money if the performance won't be major.

I guess it comes down to a few things.
1) Do you want to have HDMI 2.0? Fury X doesn't have it
2) Do you want to use gameworks stuff or do you not really care?
3) Do you want a smaller card? Fury X is a small card and has the water cooling stuff instead of a big heatpipe cooling system.

 

[Mako88]

I guess it comes down to a few things.
1) Do you want to have HDMI 2.0? Fury X doesn't have it
2) Do you want to use gameworks stuff or do you not really care?
3) Do you want a smaller card? Fury X is a small card and has the water cooling stuff instead of a big heatpipe cooling system.

Yes on 1 and 2 definitely, 980 Ti hands down. Especially lately as the gameworks support has been amazing to see in recent games like GTA V, Witcher 3, and hopefully someday Arkham Knight (lol see what I did there?).

But #3...oh #3 is a seductive mistress....would have loved to have the FX for the size and cooler as I've used AIO hybrid coolers on GPUs previously and loved them.

But unfortunately #1 was my deal-breaker on FX, needed HDMI 2.0.

Good checklist cmdrdredd.

I do think that the air version of the FX is extremely compelling though, regardless of size.

For $1100 you're getting FX crossfire, which should be incredible (wish AMD would have supplied sites with dual FX cards to test as Nvidia often dows, no Crossfire Fury X results yet).

That to me looks like the sweet spot.

 

[happy medium]

I do think that the air version of the FX is extremely compelling though, regardless of size.

I think it will be much slower ,loud and hot

 

[happy medium]

That to me looks like the sweet spot.

crossfire the sweetspot? mabe it they had 8gb of memory.

 

[Mako88]

I think it will be much slower ,loud and hot

crossfire the sweetspot? mabe it they had 8gb of memory.

Definitely agree on the speed, if they lower the clock on the air version...oh hell no.

I'm assuming they won't do that, but you're right, this is AMD of course...masters of the furnace/watt eating/massively inefficient GPU and hell-on-earth internal case temperatures so who knows...maybe the air FX version will downclock to 950MHz, and at that speed I wouldn't have been interested anyway. Not when both of the 980 Ti SC+ cards I bought this week are stable on air so far at an in-game 1450MHz Boost clock.

On the 4GB memory, it seems to be ok in the 4k benchmarks, I don't see the VRAM limit being hit and punishing the FX in scores too badly so far.

 

[sze5003]

Yes on 1 and 2 definitely, 980 Ti hands down. Especially lately as the gameworks support has been amazing to see in recent games like GTA V, Witcher 3, and hopefully someday Arkham Knight (lol see what I did there?).

But #3...oh #3 is a seductive mistress....would have loved to have the FX for the size and cooler as I've used AIO hybrid coolers on GPUs previously and loved them.

But unfortunately #1 was my deal-breaker on FX, needed HDMI 2.0.

Good checklist cmdrdredd.

I do think that the air version of the FX is extremely compelling though, regardless of size.

For $1100 you're getting FX crossfire, which should be incredible (wish AMD would have supplied sites with dual FX cards to test as Nvidia often dows, no Crossfire Fury X results yet).

That to me looks like the sweet spot.

Yea and considering I may get a 24" monitor with higher resolution the Ti also has 6gb memory. I don't have a desk setup to do dual monitors so I'd mostly run one monitor at a time.

As for #1 ehh I could get an adapter as I don't do 4k. Don't really care for game works or special gpu programs.

Water cooling is alright but I was assuming you could OC the crap out of it..cant so to me its not worth extra points if it isn't scoring better than the 980ti.

 

[Mako88]

Yea and considering I may get a 24" monitor with higher resolution the Ti also has 6gb memory. I don't have a desk setup to do dual monitors so I'd mostly run one monitor at a time.

As for #1 ehh I could get an adapter as I don't do 4k. Don't really care for game works or special gpu programs.

Water cooling is alright but I was assuming you could OC the crap out of it..cant so to me its not worth extra points if it isn't scoring better than the 980ti.

That's the most disappointing thing of all, the Fury X's awful awful voltage-locked overclocking.

Having to go to a warranty-voiding aftermarket BIOS just to get voltage control back, and then likely not seeing any major increase in MHz anyway, is a major disappointment.

Fury X at its max OC of 1150MHz is nowhere near the fps rates at 4k that a 980 Ti or TX is at their extremely typical 1400MHz+ boost clock range. 15-20% slower in that scenario. Only against stock 980 Ti clocks does the Fury X trade blows as we're seeing today in most of the reviews (stock and OC'd Fury Xs being compared ONLY against stock 980 Ti cards non-OC'd).