discussion The AMD R9 Fury X Review; Fiji Arrives. Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

AWW HWC is just another AMD fanboy site!!!

SKYMTL: would you ever consider going back after a few driver revs to update the review to see if 1440p performance improves. I know drivers should be ready at launch but the low performance at that res is perplexing... :blarg:

Sure. I just hate having to do this with every AMD launch....

AMD hasn't exactly been on top of the driver thing for the last year anyways. See my thoughts on it from THIS ARTICLE:

Taking a look back at the last six months AMD’s new beta drivers were introduced on January 18th, March 20th and May 29th with a minor update between the latter two for FreeSync implementation. While seemingly frequent, these dates align perfectly with NVIDIA’s introduction of their GTX 960, TITAN X and GTX 980 Ti respectively.

Indeed the previous AMD driver roadmap looks purely reactionary to NVIDIA’s releases rather than software being rolled out to address optimizations for newer games. It should also be mentioned their last WHQL signed driver (a key component for many system builders) was unveiled in December of last year. That’s a disturbing trend that cannot be allowed to continue if AMD wants Fiji to compete against Maxwell, let alone Pascal.

 

[Lysrin]

I did read that article and agree with what you've quoted there.

I may get pummelled for saying this but I used to be a die hard ATI fan when it was still a Canadian company. I faithful bought ATI cards and pushed my way through driver issues and sometimes lower performance (not always) than the competition because I wanted to support "local". Then ATI went to AMD and the rationale behind living through the driver and bloated Catalyst frustrations just didn't hold up anymore. Shortly after that I switched to the green team. I know AMD has improved the drivers a lot from those early Catalyst days, but since I now run NVIDIA and have generally very little to no driver issues the play to get me back to AMD has to be pretty compelling. As I said, Fury X at this point doesn't look like it.

Let the pummelling being... :shok:

 

[Ernimus Prime]

My question is. Where is all the overclocking abilities at. Since that is what AMD fed us at E3. Or do we have to wait for an update to CCC for it to work better with Fury? Why have a liquid cooler if it can't be taken advantage of?

 

[jurassic1024]

Did you read the next line??

Given the current situation, I really don’t think that is going to happen since we’re being presented with a statistical tie at 4K and a clear loss at 1440P.

I read the whole thing. I was reacting to just the idea. Based on nVIDIA's past history, nVIDIA's current 76% market share, the hideous Fury X overclocking results and lack of any worthy software add-ons had my guts hurting badly from laughing.

TLDR: Your "I really don't think" doesn't make the previous line go away. Thanks for the laugh.

 

[Sagath]

I read the whole thing. I was reacting to just the idea. Based on nVIDIA's past history, nVIDIA's current 76% market share, the hideous Fury X overclocking results and lack of any worthy software add-ons had my guts hurting badly from laughing.

TLDR: Your "I really don't think" doesn't make the previous line go away. Thanks for the laugh.

Yeah. Heaven forbid he questions IF something could happen that could benefit the customer.

We wouldnt want to do that, now would we? :blarg:

 

[Dzzope]

I read fast

I'm LOVING the price point.

I'm VERY concerned about the 1440p performance. How the hell does this thing shine at 4k against a TITAN, and fail against a 980 at 1440? Is this drivers, or architecture?

This card feels like a Bleeding edge 1st generation not-quite-there-yet test. I have a feeling the follow-up revision (490x? Fury 2 X?) will have a LOT more balls as AMD learns more about HBM and their architecture. Which leads me to my next point: As a guy who games currently at 1440p, and wants to upgrade from a 970 to this or a 980ti...What do I do? I'll say, this card has me debating holding off for some driver updates, or remake, or price drop of the 980ti, or...

Sigh. This didnt make my choices any easier. Stupid AMD. :haha:

I'd go 980Ti Hybrid from EVGA.. Fury will be more than it for the first few months... either that or wait.. TBH, I'd be waiting for next gen before changing a 970 unless your planning to do both.

As for pricing to performance on this... from a pure price to performance basis, the 980Ti kicks Fury's ass into the grass simply because it overclocks like a boss and fury... Well some are reporting issues at +50Mhz... That just compounds the "driver"issues they are having (I can't believe I'm saying this but I actually hope it is driver issues and not architectural)

The card isn't bad.. it's just out-classed at this price by the Ti.. Titan on the other hand.. this makes sense against in some ways.


BTW, as always, GREAT review sky and Dmitry, such quality I cannot find anywhere else.. If you guys went pro LTT would need to watch out (though he does have something that works in the more "raw" format he uses) The quality of the reviews and videos just gets better and better.. Don't know how you do it.

 

[Fudd Rucker]

Heres to hoping that the nano will live up to the hype. Been scrimping and saving for the past little while to get myself a 4k display. Otherwise it looks like I might just snap up a pair of cheap 290x.

 

[zoob]

VisionTek Radeon R9 Fury X Graphic Card - 900814
$699 + $10 shipping
Buy the VisionTek Radeon R9 Fury X Graphic Card - 900814 at TigerDirect.ca

 

[10e]

I read the whole thing. I was reacting to just the idea. Based on nVIDIA's past history, nVIDIA's current 76% market share, the hideous Fury X overclocking results and lack of any worthy software add-ons had my guts hurting badly from laughing.

TLDR: Your "I really don't think" doesn't make the previous line go away. Thanks for the laugh.

Maybe you should lose the guts then.

Back to the review, I think it was a fair review, and the Fury X has some compelling features, and from the looks of it should be an amazing folding@home card, but I wonder why they allocated space to so many shaders and didn't uptick the ROPs at all over Hawaii. I think this was a major faux pas on their part and contributes to the lower than hyped performance.

We'll see how this plays out in the future. I'm on the fence with this one, at best, and can't help buy being slightly disappointed by the performance.

 

['47 Knucklehead]

So finally the wait is over, the hype fest is done, and now we all know what many have suspected ...

The AMD Fury X is a good card, but is it HARDLY the "Titan Killer" that they claimed it would be. It is for the most part about 3% slower on average than the GTX 980Ti (for the exact same price). FreeSync support and monitors are still a mess compared to nVidia G-Sync, the card doesn't have a DVI port so that hoses anyone who is using the 120/144Hz Korean 1440p monitors that only support DVI, and the card only has HDMI 1.4a, not 2.0. Further, it only seems to overclock by about 10% (maybe people will get it up to 15% in time), and the memory is HOT ... 104C because it's not a full cover block.

Still, it's an impressive card, but honestly, all things being equal, unless you already own a FreeSync monitor (which is unlikely ... unless it's been already sent back to be fixed by BenQ), you'd be better served to get a GTX 980Ti for the same money.

Basically, the Fury X is nothing more than a test bed for HBM GEN 1 memory, and AMD is using it in the hopes that people won't buy the GTX 980Ti ... since the rest of their 300 series is basically just a total rebrand of the 200 series.