The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
When the R9 Fury X launched, one of the games it struggled with was Battlefield 4, where the GTX 980 Ti took a clear lead. However for the launch of the R9 Fury, things are much more in AMD’s favor. The two R9 Fury cards have a lead just shy of 10% over the GTX 980, roughly in-line with their price tag difference. As a result of that difference AMD needs to win in more or less every game by 10% to justify the R9 Fury’s higher price, and we’re starting things off exactly where AMD needs to be for price/performance parity.
Looking at the absolute numbers, we’re going to see AMD promote the R9 Fury as a 4K card, but even with Battlefield 4 I feel this is a good example of why it’s better suited for high quality 1440p gaming. The only way the R9 Fury can maintain an average framerate over 50fps (and thereby reasonable minimums) with a 4K resolution is to drop to a lower quality setting. Otherwise at just over 60fps, it’s in great shape for a 1440p card.
As for the R9 Fury X comparison, it’s interesting how close the R9 Fury gets. The cut-down card is never more than 7% behind the R9 Fury X. Make no mistake, the R9 Fury X is meaningfully faster, but scenarios such as these question whether it’s worth the extra $100.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
288 Comments
View All Comments
Makaveli - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Why would it perform the same this Fury is not throttling due to heat it has less performance due to having less hardware.tviceman - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
So it looks like OC'd GTX 980 @ 1440p is going to be faster, on average, than an OC'd Fury @ 1440p.....refin3d - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Potentially, we don't really know what is going to happen exactly with the cards being voltage locked.tviceman - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
That's easy to deduce: ~8% more OC performance for 150-200 more watts power consumption.ToTTenTranz - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
No Hawaii in the compute tests?Ryan Smith - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Whoops. Forgot to include them when generating the graphs. I'll go fill those intitan13131 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It would be cool if damaged chips weren't all disabled to the same level i.e. only the faulty parts were disabled on each chip. Then amd could charge a little more for something they have already produced and we would have access to cards closer to the performance of the fury x (with a little overclocking) for less. Assuming the ref cooler can handle the extra heat.Asomething - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
then they would have to market, package and ship the extra cards as well as optimize for another chip, used to be you could unlock the salvage chips if the damages were not too bad (some fully unlocked into the full chips in some cases where chips are cut simply to meet the demand for the cut chips) but amd and nvidia now laser off the disabled parts to stop that.Kevin G - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
This really highlights the idea that AMD should have focused on increasing ROP count over the massive amount of shaders. HBM not only increased bandwidth but the delta color compression increased effective bandwidth as well but AMD didn't alter the number of ROPs in the design.extide - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It's not the ROPs. Look at the 3dmark tests, it tops the Pixel throughput charts.What it needs is more geometry power, not ROPs. Look at the tessellation results, the Furys can't even keep up with a GTX 780. THAT is their issue, they need more geometry horsepower.