AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review

To some people, AMD has fallen behind Nvidia because of its lack of response to cards like the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan X, but that stops now, with the red team unleashing its newest flagship GPU: the Radeon R9 Fury X.

It's an interesting chip that impresses in several key departments. AMD's familiar architecture has been upgraded in every important area, and the corporation has ditched air-cooling for a separate water-cooling module that it promises can keep the beefy chip chilled.

This amount of hardware doesn't come cheap, however, which means you'll have to shell out $650 for the Fury X. That's similar cash to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which is the Fury’s main 4K rival.

Radeon Fury X Specs

AMD’s new GPU is called Fiji, and it turbo-charges the existing Graphics Core Next architecture to help the Fury compete with the 980 Ti.

The core is constructed from four Shader Engines, with each divided into 16 Compute Units--and each of those is rammed with 64 stream processors. That means the Fury X is built with 4,096 of those stream processors, which is a huge jump from the 2,816 included in the GTX 980 Ti and the Radeon R9 290X, which was AMD’s previous flagship.

The new GPU is clocked to 1,050MHz, which is about 50MHz more than the GTX 980 Ti, and the chip is built from a 8.9 billion transistors--which, if you're counting, is almost one billion more than the Nvidia GPU.

"AMD hasn’t just turbo-charged its major components to build the Fury X, it has also deployed a new memory system."

AMD hasn’t just turbo-charged its major components to build the Fury X, it has also deployed a new memory system. The new chips are called High Bandwidth Memory and replace the more familiar GDDR5, and they change the fundamental structure of memory to improve performance: the chips are stacked vertically as well as horizontally, and they’re accessed using a far wider bus than any previous graphics memory system.

Those changes improve performance and increase efficiency so much that AMD only has to run the Fury X’s memory at 1,000MHz and it still manages to far exceed the GTX 980 Ti in bandwidth. AMD’s new card can deliver a theoretical throughput of 512GB/s, while the Nvidia card offers 336GB/s.

The structure of other components remains the same. A single Graphics Command Processor still controls the chip from above, and each Shader Engine retains its dedicated texture and rasteriser units. The 28nm manufacturing process also remains in place.

Innovation isn’t limited to the inside of the card. Traditional air-cooling has been ditched in favour of a water-cooling unit that’s similar to the pre-built devices available for processors. It’s a double-edged sword; the cooler is modestly sized and helps the card measure just 195mm, which is almost 100mm shorter than other top cards, but the cooler does require a 120mm mount inside of a chassis. That shouldn't be hard to find in most enclosures, but it's still something to bear in mind.

The water-cooling bodes well for keeping the chip chilled, and we don’t expect the Fury X to prove hotter than its rivals either; its top power requirement, of 275W, is competitive. To get the Fury X running you’ll need a PSU with two eight-pin connectors, which is a little more than the eight- and six-pin connectors needed with the GTX 980 Ti.

There’s one major area where the Fury X can’t compete, though, and that’s partner cards, as in, the modified versions of GPUs that often appear with overclocked cores, different cooling configurations and extra features. At the moment AMD isn’t opening the Fury X to board partner modification, which means you have to buy its reference design instead.

That makes it important to pay attention to the Fury’s ports. We’ve no qualms about its trio of DisplayPort connectors, but the HDMI 1.4 output omits a couple of features when compared to HDMI 2.0; There’s no 4K support at 60fps or 21:9 aspect ratio support using HDMI 1.4, for instance.

Undoubtedly, the Fury X is a good-looking card. The exterior is made from metal with illuminated logos, and a row of eight LEDs indicate GPU-load in either red or blue. The main plate can be removed with four screws, and AMD has appeased modders by making the design of that plate available for 3D modelling, so it can be replaced by custom designs.

Radeon R9 Fury X vs Titan X vs Others

Radeon R9 Fury X Performance (1440p)

Radeon R9 Fury X Performance (4K)

Editor’s note: The GTX 980 Ti and R9 290X benchmarks are based on previous tests which did not account for Tomb Raider or Shadow of Mordor.

There’s no mistaking the fact that the Fury X is one of the fastest cards on the market right now--our 1080p benchmarks aren’t displayed on these graphs, but that’s because the results are elementary. If you’re playing games at 1,920 x 1,080 the Fury X is overkill.

At 1440p, the situation isn’t as clear-cut. The Fury X can easily handle any game at this higher resolution, but it faces competition from the GTX 980 Ti. The AMD card proved faster in Crysis 3, Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light, but it was never far ahead--its averages of 64fps, 131fps and 85.5fps were only a handful of frames beyond the Nvidia card.

However, the GTX 980 Ti was meaningfully faster in our four other test games--in some cases, it was ten frames or more faster than the AMD card. The GTX 980 Ti’s 1440p victory was further emphasised by our theoretical tests, in which the Nvidia card proved quicker than the Fury X in both Unigine Heaven and 3D Mark Fire Strike.

"The Fury X proved faster than the GTX 980 Ti in Crysis 3, Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light, but it was never far ahead... the 980 Ti was meaningfully faster in our four other test games."

The battle was similarly close at 4K but, crucially, the Fury X fought back. Its 3D Mark result of 3,943 is better than the GTX 980 Ti could manage, and it was a handful of frames quicker in Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, Metro and Shadow of Mordor. It’s a close-run thing, with its best victory coming with three-frame leads in two games.

Nvidia’s card took the crown in Bioshock Infinite, Batman Arkham Origins and Battlefield 4, but only by similarly slim margins. Its best result came from Batman, where it was six frames better than the Fury X.

The Fury X fell behind at 1440p and just about took an overall victory at 4K, but neither card proved dominant, and the Fury X’s improved 4K performance is undermined elsewhere. Nvidia’s card is a few frames back in some of our 4K tests, but the GTX 980 Ti is available in dozens of overclocked configurations, and most of those will help the green team’s hardware catch up. That’s something not available with the Fury X, which is only manufacturerd as a reference design.

Meanwhile, The Fury X performed well in thermal tests. The Fury’s water-cooling unit saw the core hit a maximum temperature of 65°C, which is far cooler than the 82°C GTX 980 Ti, but the Fury X wasn’t as frugal as its rival: our AMD-powered rig drew 369W from the mains, but the GTX 980 Ti machine needed just 330W.

Gallery

Verdict

The revisions made to AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture means the Fury X delivers a huge leap over its predecessor, and it’s got plenty of innovation on board – the water-cooling unit is impressively effective, and the revised memory system delivers incredible bandwidth with a smaller, slower amount of RAM.

AMD's latest chip is consistently quick, but it can’t quite overhaul the GTX 980 Ti. It just about loses out at 1440p, and at 4K its slight lead will be wiped out by many of the overclocked Nvidia cards that have entered the market. While AMD’s latest card is an undoubted 4K contender, especially if the card’s smaller size appeals, it’s only able to draw level with Nvidia rather than take a clear lead.