The Test

On a brief note, since last month’s R9 Fury X review, AMD has reunified their driver base. Catalyst 15.7, released on Wednesday, extends the latest branch of AMD’s drivers to the 200 series and earlier, bringing with it all of the optimizations and features that for the past few weeks have been limited to the R9 Fury series and the 300 series.

As a result we’ve gone back and updated our results for all of the AMD cards featured in this review. Compared to the R9 Fury series launch driver, the performance and behavior of the R9 Fury series has not changed, nor were we expecting it to. Meanwhile AMD’s existing 200/8000/7000 series GCN cards have seen a smattering of performance improvements that are reflected in our results.

CPU: Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200i
Hard Disk: Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB)
Memory: G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26)
Case: NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition
Monitor: Asus PQ321
Video Cards: AMD Radeon R9 Fury X
AMD Radeon R9 290X
AMD Radeon R9 285
AMD Radeon HD 7970
ASUS STRIX R9 Fury
Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury OC
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
Video Drivers: NVIDIA Release 352.90 Beta
AMD Catalyst Cat 15.7
OS: Windows 8.1 Pro
Meet The ASUS STRIX R9 Fury Battlefield 4
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  • Sefem - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    "Draw calls are the best metric we have right now to compare AMD Radeon to nVidia ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD."
    Well, lets just for a moment consider this as true (and you should try to explain why :D )
    Looking at draw calls a GTX 980 should perform 2.5x faster than a 290X in DX11 (respectively 2.62M vs 1.05M draw calls) and even a GTX 960 would be 2.37x faster than the over mentioned 290X (respectively 2.49M vs 1.05M draw calls) :)
  • D. Lister - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link

    Performing minor optimizations, on an API that isn't even out yet, to give themselves the appearance of a theoretical advantage in some arbitrary GPU function, as a desperate attempt to keep themselves relevant, is so very AMD (their motto should be, "we will take your money now, and give you its worth... later..., maybe.)

    Meanwhile people at NV are optimizing for the API that is currently actually being used to make games, and raising their stock value and market share while they're at it.

    Why wouldn't AMD optimize for DX11, and instead do what it's doing? Because DX11 is a mature API, so any further improvements would be small, yet expensive, while DX12 isn't even out yet, so it would be comparatively cheaper to get bigger gains, and AMD is seriously low on funds.

    Realistically, proper DX12 games are stll 2-3 years away. By that time AMD probably wouldn't even be around anymore.

    Hence, in conclusion, whatever DX12 performance the Fury trio (or AMD in general) claims, means absolutely nothing at this point.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    Thank GOD for nvidia or amd would have this priced so sky high no one could afford it.

    Instead of crazy high scalping greedy pricing amd only greeded up on price perf the tiny bit it could since it can't beat nvidia, who saved our wallets again !

    THANK YOU NVIDIA ! YOUR COMPETITION HAS KEPT THE GREEDY RED TEAM FROM EXHORBITANT OVERPRICING LIKE THEY DID ON THEIR 290 SERIES !
  • f0d - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    i wasnt really impressed with the fury-x at its price point and performance
    this normal fury seems a bit better at it price point than the fury-x does

    as i write this the information on overclocking wasnt finished - i sure hope the fury overclocks much better than fury-x did because that was a massive letdown when it came to overclocking, when nvidia can get some crazy high overclocks with its maxwell it kinda makex the fury line seem not as good with its meager overclocks the fury-x had
    hopefully fury (non x) overclocks like a beast like the nvidia cards do
  • noladixiebeer - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    AMD haven't unlocked the voltage yet on Fury X. Hopefully, they will unlock the voltage cap soon, so the Fury X should be able to overclock better. Better than 980ti? We'll see, but Fury X still has lots of uptapped resources.
  • Chaser - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link

    Don't hold you breath. There is very little overhead in Fiji. That's clearly been divulged. As the article states Maxwell is very efficient and has a good deal of room for partners to indulge themselves. Especially the Ti.
  • chrnochime - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    The WC for the X makes up ~half of the price increase from non-x. For someone who's going to do moderate OC and don't want to bother doing WC conversion the X is a good choice, even over a Ti.
  • cmdrdredd - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    no it's not...the 980ti bests it handily. It's not a good choice at all when 980ti can overclock as well and many coolers have 0rpm fan modes for when it's at idle or very low usage.
  • akamateau - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link

    You haven't seen the DX12 Benchmarks yet. Anand has been keeping them from you. Once you see how much Radeon crushes nVidia you would never buy green again.

    nVidia silicon is RUBBISH with DX12 and Mantle. Radeon 290x is 33% faster than GTX 980Ti.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    sefem already told you...
    " "Draw calls are the best metric we have right now to compare AMD Radeon to nVidia ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD."
    Well, lets just for a moment consider this as true (and you should try to explain why :D )
    Looking at draw calls a GTX 980 should perform 2.5x faster than a 290X in DX11 (respectively 2.62M vs 1.05M draw calls) and even a GTX 960 would be 2.37x faster than the over mentioned 290X (respectively 2.49M vs 1.05M draw calls) :) "

    Now go back to stroking your amd spider platform.

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