Small on size, big on performance
The Fury X is the first release in a range of high-end graphics cards all based around the Fiji chip, debuting in Australia on June 25, and it’s going to be the most expensive. With an Aussie recommended price of $979, this water-cooled speed demon is AMD’s new flagship graphics card. Soon after its launch will come Fury, an air-cooled version of the product at a lower price. AMD wouldn’t reveal any other changes to the Fury, but we expect fewer Stream Processors and/or a lower clock speed. If it’s anything like other product releases, expect a sizeable price drop yet most of the Fury X performance in the new Fury, which is probably why AMD isn’t releasing any info on it, for fear of eating into Fury X sales.
Finally there’s the R9 Nano, which is just six inches long, making it the perfect product for tiny Mini-ITX cases. With a TDP of just 175W, AMD claims it is the most power efficient high end GPU on the market. It was this card that AMD showed off in its new Project Quantum miniature gaming PC, which measures just ten inches across, and which AMD expects will release sometime next year. While both cards sound interesting, we’re here to talk about the Fury X, so let’s get on with it.
THE MEMORY MASTER
The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the Fury X is how damn small it is, measuring just 19.4 centimetres long, and 30 percent shorter than previous full-sized graphics cards. The reason behind this is the revolutionary new High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) featured on this product, which replaces the GDDR5 memory used until now. Past GPUs had their memory modules mounted on the Printed Circuit Board that makes up the bulk of a modern graphics card, and they needed plenty of space to fit them all. In stark contrast, the memory modules used by the Fiji processor are actually built into the GPU, and they’re a fraction of the size of normal memory modules. Looking at the close-up photo of the GPU, the memory sections are the four small squares on the outer ring. Unlike traditional GDDR5 memory, the HBM memory actually runs at a slower clockspeed, but over an incredibly wide bus. AMD’s Radeon R9 290X used a 512-bit bus running 5GHz GDDR5 memory, delivering an industry leading 320GB/sec of bandwidth. Compare this to the HBM memory used on Fury, which only runs at 500MHz DDR, but over a huge 4096-bit bus. This delivers an incredible 512GB/sec of bandwidth, 60% faster than the R9 290X and the most memory bandwidth ever seen on a consumer graphics card.
This gives the Fury X plenty of memory bandwidth for high-resolution displays, and AMD is pushing this as a 4K product, but there’s one major issue. Despite AMD pushing the marketing message over the last few years that higher resolutions require more onboard memory, the Fury X only ships with 4GB of HBM memory. It’s a huge backflip for AMD, especially when the company is promoting the 8GB of memory found on its R9 390X product. 4GB is a rather small amount when we’re talking about 4K gaming, with many current games needing more than that when run at 4K resolution and high-detail settings.
This means that Fury X potentially faces major performance issues when playing 4K games. If it needs to fetch memory from the PC’s RAM once its onboard memory is filled, performance will plummet as the bandwidth to the PC’s system memory is a fraction of that compared to the GPU’s onboard memory. To test this out for ourselves, we ran GTAV in 4K mode, first with nearly every setting maxed, which requires a whopping 5382MB of video memory. Then we lowered texture detail and population variety, which drops the onboard memory required to 4045MB, without causing any other performance differences. As expected, when the Fury X had to fetch data from the system memory the performance plummeted, with a minimum framerate of just 2.4fps. When the card didn’t need to access system memory the minimum framerate was much healthier, at 15.5fps, showing just how bad performance becomes when the graphics card runs out of memory. This is a big blow to AMD’s claims about Fury X being ready for 4K gaming.
While the memory is the most revolutionary aspect of the Fury X, the Fiji GPU is a monster in its own right. It’s the most complex GPU AMD has ever built, with nine billion transistors filling the 596 square millimeter die. Inside the GPU are 64 Compute Units, delivering a total of 4096 Stream Processors and 256 Texture Units. That’s a huge increase over the R9 290X, which had 2816 Stream Processors and 176 Texture Units. It’s built on the existing 28nm process, which probably explains why the card has a TDP of 275W, and it’s fed via twin 8-pin power connectors. That’s identical to the TDP of its new R9 390X but, likely due to the small size of the card, AMD has equipped the Fury X with an All-in-One water cooler. AMD claims the new cooler outputs less than 32dB of fan noise, but during our testing we found it to be louder, topping out at 45dB. However, it does keep the GPU very cool, with the maximum temperature we measured at 50C under load.
THE SOFTWARE SIDE
As far as new features that the user can make the most of, the Fury X comes with the usual Radeon suite of goodies. CrossFire is supported for up to four Fury X graphics cards, while FreeSync is also on the box. It’s fully DirectX 12 compliant, but the one new feature we dig is basically AMD’s version of Dynamic Super Resolution. AMD calls it Virtual Super Resolution instead, but it does the exact same job which used to be known as downsampling, allowing the user to set games to render at resolutions higher than those supported by their display, clearing up jaggies in the process. For those of you who have had to jump through the hoops necessary to get DownSampling working manually in the past, having a simple drop down option in the Catalyst Control Centre will be a welcome addition.
PERFORMANCE
We only had one day to test the Fury X, but threw as many benchmarks as possible at it. Our testbench was the ASUS Maximus VII Ranger with an Intel i7-4790K CPU, along with 8GB of Kingston HyperX memory. Corsair’s new RM850i PSU delivered the juice, while a SanDisk Ultra II handled storage duties. Gigabyte’s brilliant GTX 980 Ti Gaming G1 card was used to represent AMD’s mortal enemy, NVIDIA. We should note that this card runs around 10% faster than stock a GTX 980 Ti, yet only costs around $60 more than a standard GTX 980 Ti, at $1099. AMD’s 15.15 Catalyst drivers were used for AMD, while NVIDIA’s 353.30 drivers were used for the GeForce.
While the Fury X didn’t have the lead in any of our benchmarks, it came very close in two of them, being FireStrike Ultra (4K) and Shadow of Mordor (4K). Here it performed within 15% of the GeForce card; remove the Gigabyte’s 10% headway resulting from its factory overclock and the Fury X is basically neck and neck with a stock GTX 980 Ti. Unfortunately the Fury X didn’t perform quite so well in the remainder of our tests. NVIDIA had a 30% lead in Grid Autosport, with another 33% lead in Metro 2033 at 4K (strangely our 980 Ti refused to run Metro 2033 in 2560 x 1440 mode). GTA V saw the GeForce with a 22% lead at 4K, while the new Batman game gave the GeForce a 27% lead at 4K res, and that was with all GameWorks features disabled.
We sadly didn’t have time to overclock our Fury X, but despite the losses to the GTX 980 Ti in our benchmarks we’re still very impressed by Fury X. It’s not quite the GeForce killer AMD claims it to be, but it comes damn close, especially once we remove our 980 Ti’s Factory overclock. With an RRP of $979 we can expect the street price of Fury X to be even lower, which will make it extremely competitive with NVIDIA’s flagship card.
However, we have two major concerns with Fury X, the first being AMD’s driver support. To be frank, the company has dropped the ball of late, with the last WHQL release in December of 2015, which simply isn’t good enough. Hopefully now that it has a capable bit of hardware in-hand it can focus on improving the driver support, which could lead to substantial performance gains for the Fury X. Of greater concern though is the 4GB memory limit, which is a real issue when 4K gaming. There’s nothing AMD can do about this other than release a product with 8GB of HBM memory, and until then this lack of memory puts paid to any claims about Fury X being a true 4K gaming solution. BENNETT RING
VERDICT
With better driver support and aggressive pricing hopefully AMD can deliver a product that is truly competitive with NVIDIA’s flagship.