AMD R9 Fury X reviews!

[exar333]

So then you need a place for at least two radiators, or three or four if you want one of those uber setups.

If you have a water cooled CPU, how are all these radiators going to work? :biggrin:

It's not that bad. I have 2 x 240mm rads in my machine right now. If I wanted to go CF with Furys, I would done one of the following:

• Add both cards to the existing loop
• Remove one 240mm rad and replace with the stock CLC cooling for 2x Fury X cards

Both could work, but would require work. Custom loops always require work, so its not a huge deal. In my case, I designed my case to support a decent # of rad spaces, but had to cut out the HDD and SSD trays.

One Fury should be pretty easy to install, but each additional will be exponentially more difficult. 2x shouldn't be a big problem, but 3x would be challenging in anything smaller than a full tower, or a mid-tower designed to be WC-friendly.

 

[SketchMaster]

[snip]

I think AMD had a LOT of positive momentum after last week's E3. Yes they had a good deal of re-brands, but Fury was exciting. To follow-through with just a single product and the rest TBD is a little disappointing IMHO.

What a difference a week makes.

Can't argue with you on the fact NV will put out something in 1-2 quarters that will rub AMD's face in the dirt again; but, it will generate a response from NV and the consumers still win.

What I'm impressed by the most are the engineers who actually put out a chip that caught up with NV for the first time in years. AMD as a whole is teetering on the edge, swapping out CEOs more often than I swap the air filter on my car, and haven't turned a profit in a while, but they still managed to pump out this card. When you take into account the environment engineers are working in - no money and fractured leadership - they did an admirable job.

Will it save them? Not with just one card. it is a step in the right direction however, and something NV will need to respond to.

 

[sam_816]

Miss out on the 980ti and the free Batman game. Thanks AMD

which game are you getting worked up about? that poorly optimised console port? here! you can buy it for 20 bux

Go ahead:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127871&cm_re=980ti-_-14-127-871-_-Product

Chill out, it's just a bunch of video games

he wasn't going to get any card or game. just finding reasons to hate on AMD..

 

[x3sphere]

To me this a decent win overall for AMD.

AMD is actually innovating again, they have gotten power draw to a reasonable state, and have more or less caught up with Nvidia within the price bracket. We may even get a surprise with windows 10 and find out AMD created a hell of a card for DX12 gaming. Will I run out an buy one? No. I am happy to see it on the market though.

If anything, it shows AMD is slowly getting its act back together - with it's GFX chips anyway - and will keep NV from monopolizing the market.

So while it's a small win, it's still a win.

They were doing better before. 290X was very competitive with NV's offerings across the board. Lower price, it was faster than 780 at launch and traded blows with Titan and forced them to release 780 Ti. The power consumption thing was overblown, it's really a shame they got blasted for that.

What does the Fury do in comparison? For starters it's the same price. It's quite a bit slower than 980 Ti at 1440p and 1080p@144Hz. The gap is only narrowed at 4K which is a niche market right now. I expect 4K usage will go up a lot in a year or so, but we'll be talking about next-gen GPUs by then.

The way I see it Nvidia is going to have almost another year of no competition in anything but the 4K segment. The 300 series hasn't brought down mid-range prices at all, in fact AMD increased their prices there.

 

[krumme]

They were doing better before. 290X was very competitive with NV's offerings across the board. Lower price, it was faster than 780 at launch and traded blows with Titan and forced them to release 780 Ti. The power consumption thing was overblown, it's really a shame they got blasted for that.

What does the Fury do in comparison? For starters it's the same price. It's quite a bit slower than 980 Ti at 1440p and 1080p@144Hz. The gap is only narrowed at 4K which is a niche market right now. I expect 4K usage will go up a lot in a year or so, but we'll be talking about next-gen GPUs by then.

The way I see it Nvidia is going to have almost another year of no competition in anything but the 4K segment. The 300 series hasn't brought down mid-range prices at all, in fact AMD increased their prices there.

Amd cant decide prices. Even though they sometimes think.
Market does.

And if amd think they can keep prices they will have gigantic stock and lose market share even more. Like spring when 680 launched and rr thought he could use his usual retail thinking. Nope.
They might think they can price their products to be premium. But it doesnt work that way. When the very few amd supporters have bought at those prices the supply-demand effect will kick prices down.

No need to worry. Its always like that.
When that happen it will show fury range is far better than 290 series. In that time - perhaps 3 months - x is probably faster than 980ti stock even at 1440. So it will do just fine. And the die is slightly smaller for less cost.
Just wait and see.

 

[DiogoDX]

For me Fiji is having a major bottleneck. Maybe ROPs or the front end.

Is like Thaiti all over again:

7970 - 2 raster - 2 geometry - 32 ROPs - 2048sps
FuryX - 4 raster - 4 geometry - 64 ROPs - 4096sps

My more balanced Fiji would have 6 raster/geometry - 96 ROPs but they probably ran out of die area in 28nm.

 

[swilli89]

So then you need a place for at least two radiators, or three or four if you want one of those uber setups.

If you have a water cooled CPU, how are all these radiators going to work?

The antec p280 has 4 120mm outs so in that case I would still have a normal fan in one of the spots.

 

[Enigmoid]

For me Fiji is having a major bottleneck. Maybe ROPs or the front end.

Is like Thaiti all over again:

7970 - 2 raster - 2 geometry - 32 ROPs - 2048sps
FuryX - 4 raster - 4 geometry - 64 ROPs - 4096sps

My more balanced Fiji would have 6 raster/geometry - 96 ROPs but they probably ran out of die area in 28nm.

The card looks like basically a double tonga so any problems should have been seen in tonga.

 

[Tovarisc]

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.

 

[krumme]

The card looks like basically a double tonga so any problems should have been seen in tonga.

Yep. So what is it then? I miss 5-10%

 

[DiogoDX]

The card looks like basically a double tonga so any problems should have been seen in tonga.

Not all doubled. Same front end that Tonga with 4 raster/geometry.

 

[krumme]

Whats the mm2 of tonga?

 

[DiogoDX]

Whats the mm2 of tonga?

~360mm^2

 

[Despoiler]

Whats the mm2 of tonga?

359mm2

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review

 

[Head1985]

Not all doubled. Same front end that Tonga with 4 raster/geometry.

So why they didnt doubled raster/geometry to 8/8 when FIJI have 2x more SP than tonga?
This is HUGE mistake.
Tonga

Hawaii

FIJI

 

[happy medium]

Wasn't the 960Ti also really late

They still didn't review the 960, the 960ti is not released yet.

 

[exar333]

They still didn't review the 960, the 960ti is not released yet.

Thats right.

 

[2is]

early drivers

If only AMD knew this card was coming. They could have had a proper driver available for it...

 

[exar333]

If only AMD knew this card was coming. They could have had a proper driver available for it...

It surprised them like the 980ti...;

j/k

It is pretty inexcusable to not have a way to OC your card these days at lauch. Yet another head scratcher...

 

[el etro]

Better head out to B3D forums ask the engineers opinion about a possible ROP/ACE bottleneck on Fiji. We don't really know if it happens or not. But DX11/DX9 driver overhead problem do exist, and must be fixed.

 

[crashtech]

Well AMD has done very well given their position, and yet I was hoping for Fury X to be just a bit closer or even slightly in excess of the 980ti. Green Team is a pretty tough adversary for a company that, by some measures, is on the ropes. The current showing is perhaps not quite enough to justify pricing equal to the 980ti, but at least it is not without a challenger. I think I will have to wait for Fury Pro, or for Fury X to drop in price.

 

[JDG1980]

The card looks like basically a double tonga so any problems should have been seen in tonga.

Maybe that's why we never got full Tonga - because it would be ROP bottlenecked and not much better than the cutdown version?

 

[destrekor]

Of course I expected the original hype and leaks suggesting a massive blow out in performance to be inaccurate, I must say, I am disappointed.
I was getting all geared up to replace my two 290X Lightning cards if CFX and have a single card that would match them in performance without worrying about stuttering or scaling.

Guess I'd be taking quite a step back by selling these cards and picking up the Fury X, at least based on where things stand now. Drivers could change or perhaps special boosted/OC versions may come out from AIBs. Or a Fury X redux like Titan to Titan Black... till then, I guess I wait.

 

[Enigmoid]

Maybe that's why we never got full Tonga - because it would be ROP bottlenecked and not much better than the cutdown version?

I think full tonga would be hit a little with memory bandwidth penalties. +40% efficiency is AMD's number and the actual real world average is probably something lower. Furthermore this number only applies if the textures are easily compressible (AMD is probably going with a best case). However, tahiti has a 50% larger interface and a highly clocked full tonga would likely have a lower bandwidth to shader ratio.

IMO it looks like Fiji is bottlenecked by the front end. Some of this will probably be addressed by drivers but it appears to me that the front end simply cannot allocate smaller frames as well to the huge shader arrays. GCN operates on 8x8 groups of pixels and IMO it seems like the overhead involved in breaking up the scene distributing it to the 4096 shader array is having some effect.

AMD seems to like strapping huge shader arrays to their chips. It helped with tahiti/pitcarin with tahiti pulling away as games became more shader intensive.

 

[guskline]

destrekor, I have 2 Sapphire Tri-X R9 290s in CF and under water (EK blocks) and hoped the Fury X would match their performance. Simply put it doesn't.

I'm probably going to wait until the second generation HBM2 memory comes out next year.

If you have 290X Lightnings in CF no real upgrade unless you buy 2 FuryX's

What cpu are you running them on?