The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTThe 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 |
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silverblue - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
AMD also have TrueAudio... for all the good that's doing them or the industry.jay401 - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
HDMI 2.0, 6-8GB VRAM, diversity in connector output types. I forget what else.D. Lister - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
Add to that...- Regular driver/optimal settings/SLI profile updates.
- G-Sync - more expensive, but performs better and is available across a much wider range of GPUs.
- Shadowplay, live 4K video streaming and capture.
- Game anywhere streaming via Shield tab.
- Better privacy with the software suite, since unlike the Gaming Evolved Raptr app, GFE doesn't mine you for personal data to be sold. http://mobile.pcauthority.com.au/News/362545,is-am...
RussianSensation - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
Sapphire now uses double-ball bearing fans. That means the issue with their fans dying on newer cards hasn't been proven yet. Next time please read the review more carefully.USGroup1 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
"... in a straight-up performance shootout with the GTX 980 the R9 Fury is 10% more expensive for 8%+ better performance."A very misleading conclusion. Those numbers are from comparing factory overclocked R9 Fury with reference GTX 980, Well played.
Ryan Smith - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
It's comparing the stock clocked Fury (the Asus model) with the stock clocked reference GTX 980.Dazmillion - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Does the R9 Fury have HDMI 2.0? that can be a deal breaker for 4K gamingRyan Smith - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
No. The Fiji GPU does not support HDMI 2.0.TheJian - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Since you can easily get a SUPER OC 980 for the price of Fury why not put one in the benchmarks? That is it's real competition NOT the regular 980's that are $50 less correct? IF AMD is avoiding giving a ref design for Fury regular, then why not use a OC version for 980 also? It would seem sneaky tactics by AMD here to allow AMD portal site like yours to compare products that are NOT really even. You should be using an OC 980 priced like one of the cards you reviewed. The OC card here is actually $70 more than a ref 980.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...
Multiple OC cards for $499 or less (zotac AMP $479 in cart), and come with a game. EVGA, Gbyte, Zotac, Asus Strix etc all 499 or less. MSI is the highest OC at $509 of this bunch.
EVGA has a ACX model for $499 after $30 rebate. 1279 core/1380 boost! Pitting Fury vs. regular 980's is a joke.
Also why do you keep using drivers that are TWO revs behind NV's WHQL drivers (released 353.06 may 31st, and 353.30 june 22nd. Both are later correct? Also Extremetech says 25% faster with 353.30 on Metro LL, so wondering what other games are much faster given TWO revs of drivers later than what you seem to be using here. Extremetech used the same as you (furyX) but commented on the 353.30's being faster apparently.
Still wondering when you're going to cover the WHINE of the FURY X cards that retail users have had also:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-...
Toms spent 4 pages on it. Wccftech reported it also, with vids so you could hear it (and coil whine). There are going to be RMA's over this. But not a peep about it reaching users and AMD covering OEM's here?
Ryan Smith - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
1) We do not compare OC'd cards. We did this once before; the community made it VERY clear that it was the wrong thing to do. So all of our comparisons are based on reference clocked cards against reference clocked cards. In other words we examine the baseline, so that the performance you as a consumer gets would never be lower than what we get at identical settings.http://www.anandtech.com/show/3988
2) For the NV drivers, the latest drivers do not impact the performance on our current benchmark suite in any way. Nor would we expect them to, as they're all from the same driver branch. While I have already checked some cards, the amount of time required to fully validate all of our NVIDIA cards would not be worth the effort since the results would be absolutely identical.
3) We did cover the Fury X noise. It has been the top story in the Pipeline for the last 24 hours. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9428/on-radeon-r9-fu...