Tech Avenue +
By: TechAvenue. November 30th, 2015
Welcome to our in house review of AMD's Fury X with AMD's latest and biggest driver overhaul in over a decade.
When the Fury X launched a little over 5 month's ago it received mixed reviews. Despite having a superiour hardware it fell short to the 980 Ti at 1440P and at 4K it was mixed bag. So, how has things changed several month's later with newer drivers and especially with the newer crimson drivers? Well, we are here to show you with not only our own benchmarks which includes 1440P VSR and 4K VSR benchmarks for those who don't have a 4k Monitor or 1440P monitor and you will be plenty surprised at how vastly it has improved and with recent voltage unlocking ability and with the recent price drop the Fury X, without a doubt has become a much better option than the 980 Ti. So, without boring you with the specs of the Fury X, which you should all be familiar with right now we are going straight to the good stuff.
The Specifications of our Test System:
Core i7 6700K Overclocked to 4.5 Ghz
120 GB SSD
16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RAM
XFX Radeon R9 Fury X
GIGABYTE GA-Z170XP-SLI
Corsair CX850M
Crimson Drivers - 15.11
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
To begin with I will be showing some synthetic benchmarks. I don't believe that synthetic benchmarks are representative of actual benchmarks but will do so anyways for the sake of it.
Next up, I will begin my gaming benchmark by starting off with Tomb Raider.
Metro Last Night Redux:
Battlefied 4:
Battlefield 3:
Crysis 3:
Battlefront:
Next, we have benchmark compilation of over a dozen AAA titles with newer drivers, the ones prior to crimson driver but after the June launch drivers and it shows that Fury X has now caught up to the 980 Ti on average at 1440P which is a significant improvement as it was trailing the 980 Ti with launch drivers. Not only that it has now over taken the 980 Ti at 4k basically rendering the Fury X the best buy for $600 graphics cards.
Next up, we have Crossfire vs SLI benchmarks. This shows considerable performance gains for the Fury X. Now it should be noted that this are with pre-crimson drivers so expect better results with the newer updated drivers.
As you can see, the Fury X crossfire dominated the 980 Ti SLI at 4K and even more shocking it's even beating the Titan X SLI at 4k in crossfire! Thus, a Fury X setup will save you over $800+. Talk about bang for the buck! Also, as indicated below, AMD's Fury X standard deviations in SLI as well as in Frametimes is much better than Titan X's.
But what about 4GB limit?
In our 4K testing we didn't experience any lag or stuttering at 4K. According to AMD, as stated by AnandTech, AMD has allocated 2 engineers to do memory optimizations as indicated below:
With respect to over clocking we decided to stay away from over clocking so we wanted to show you who has the best out-of-the box experience and which graphics card is the best in that regard, which is the Fury X and also due to the fact that not everyone will achieve similar over clocking results. Having said that, with the new Sapphire Trixx software, R9 Fury X can be finally be voltage unlocked and can reach 1200/600 over clocked according to some users. These speeds will put the Fury X well ahead of even a well over clocked 980 Ti as indicated by some forum members below!
Image Quality:
Over the past 10 years most tech sites has shied away from doing image quality comparisons. So, we thought it would be good idea to do image quality comparison between the current R9 series graphics card and the nVidia's Titan series graphics card from which these images were taken. The results show noticeable difference in picture quality in Battlefield 4.
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As one can see, if you look closely at the side of the tank, one can see greater detail and better color on the AMD card versus the nVidia card. The picture overall looks more vibrant and detail on the AMD card versus nVidia card.
If one looks at this picture one can see if you look at the building floors where there is black color, black is black on the AMD card while on the nVidia card it is more grayish. Also, if one looks at the gloves on the AMD card, the colors are much more detailed and vibrant, where on the nVidia card the colors look bland.
The picture quality difference is no surprise to anyone who has used both cards. The picture quality difference goes back 10 years. If you went from a nVidia card to an AMD card you would know the difference as nVidia and AMD/ATI uses different color compression techniques.
With respect to pricing, looking at newegg, the cheaper Fury X is going for $569.99 whereas it's nVidia counterpart is going for $619.99 making this a $50 price difference. We, also believe that the Fury X should have come with a air-cooled option which would have further reduced the price of the Fury X making it even more competitive to the 980 Ti. Not that we are saying we are not enjoying the liquid cooled Fury X but the added option of having a air-cooled version would have been nice. This would have been similar to what XFX is doing with the regular Fury where they have a closed loop liquid cooled version of the Fury in addition to their standard air-cooled Fury. Having said that, the $50 price difference currently should have been the price difference when the Fury X launched initially. This we believe would have made the Fury X a much more attractive option over the 980 Ti (even more so if they had a air-cooled version of the Fury X). Just food for thought for AMD going forward.
Dual, Triple, Quad GPU Scaling
Since we don't have two, three or four Fury X's to compare it to 2, 3 or 4 980 Ti's or Titan X's but a third party site does have it and they showed that the Fury X has remarkable scaling and is beating the Titan X in dual, triple and quad GPU configurations. So, if you are looking for more than two way GPU configurations that beat's the Titan X and subsequently the 980 Ti, look no further than the Fury X in multi-GPU configurations. This again shows how AMD's XDMA multi-gpu technology at work and showing how it's superiour to nVidia's way of doing mult-gpu configurations.
So, in conclusion, the Fury X is a much more polished, much more refined product with the new drivers then when it was launched. Not only is it faster, cooler, smaller, and more silent than the 980 Ti but it is even cheaper than the 980 Ti as indicated by the prices we found on newegg of the Fury X and the 980 Ti. Even at the same price the Fury X would be the better choice for the reasons stated above. Also, as drivers improve and as more and more games support 4K natively, we expect AMD to further tap into Fury X' vast power and we expect the difference between the Fury X and the 980 Ti to get bigger and bigger. This is similar to what happened in the console world between the PS4 and Xbox One. The PS4 was much more powerful than the Xbox One and as more and more games came out we saw more games running at 1080P and running it better than the Xbox One. We expect the same thing happening in the GPU world.
As a result, it's hard to recommend the 980 Ti over the Fury X. To put it bluntly, there should be no reason to choose the 980 Ti over the Fury X. The combined results and the performance features of the new drivers and the fact that the Fury X runs significantly cooler, scales better in dual GPU configurations, provides an easy recommendation for the Fury X over the 980 Ti. For that reason we give the Fury X a 9.5/10 and since it is the first GPU in the World to use the Worlds' First High Bandwidth Memory technology which we expect to be in use over the next 5 -10 years we give AMD Tech Avenue's Engineering Innovation Award.
