[HBM] Fury Unleashed : Titan Killer? Not really.

[sam_738844]

Reviews are out for the most awaited GPU launch (ever?)

AMD's back, and unleashed Fury with its latest HBM based Fiji-XT Enthusiast Grade R9-Fury X Card, is it worth all the hype that it followed? find out with all reviews rounded up.

Articles:

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X 4GB Review - Tom's Hardware

HARDOCP - Introduction to Fiji - AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Video Card Review

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X 4 GB Review | techPowerUp

AMD R9 Fury X Review; Fiji Arrives

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card review: AMD's answer to the GTX 980 Ti

Tech Report

Hexus Review

PCPer Review

Guru3D Review

Bit-Tech Review


Videos:

PCPer Video

OC3D Video

Linus Review

HardwareCanucks Video

Anandteh Bench ( Not a review )

Bench Results 980ti Vs Fury X

 

[warfreak]

Well it was expected it won't exactly kill the Titan X. But still at a price of 650$ it would be a bargain compared to 980Ti.

Hopefully we see revised prices.

 

[sam_738844]

Revised priced just after launch is too ambitious and probably will bankrupt AMD sooner than expected. But on a serious note, AMD have let down a million fans on that sad day, there is nothing to bargain when you don't have the figures in table right.

Soon there will be Classified and K|NGP|N editions out, MSI lightning's out, Asus ROG Matrix Platinum and Poseidon Hybrids out. People who are spending 650$ on both cards for base versions, will definitely spend more for those big-boys. And AMD has also locked down the design to the reference one. Guess what happens then?

Those are the scary-fast insanely clocked Maxwell beasts...will eat that Fury for Breakfast

 

[warfreak]

And AMD has also locked down the design to the reference one. Guess what happens then?

I would like to quote from Silicon Valley Season 2 Episode 10:

"They are f*cked"

 

[Desmond]

Hell. Fury X does not beat AMD's own previous flagship R9 295x2, what makes them think this could be the new Flagship?

 

[sam_738844]

Hell. Fury X does not beat AMD's own previous flagship R9 295x2, what makes them think this could be the new Flagship?

295X2 was the dual-GPU flagship, single GPU was with R9-290X which Fury has successfully outperformed.
AMD is preparing Fury X2 with massive 17+ teraflop card, teased at E3...different story...

Reviews are brutal. Check [H]ardOcp bringing the [H]ammer down [H]ard in these lines...

Built for 4K Gaming? Really?

We had a recent discussion with AMD regarding the merits of VRAM and 4K gaming. We posed a direct question to AMD to talk about the differences in VRAM between the less expensive AMD Radeon R9 390X with 8GB and the more expensive AMD Radeon R9 Fury X with half the VRAM at 4GB. Given the fact that both video cards are promoted as "4K" gaming video cards we wanted AMD's direct response to share here.

Note that HBM and GDDR5 memory sized can’t be directly compared. Think of it like comparing an SSD’s capacity to a mechanical hard drive’s capacity. As long as both capacities are sufficient to hold local data sets, much higher performance can be achieved with HBM, and AMD is hand tuning games to ensure that 4GB will not hold back Fiji’s performance. Note that the graphics driver controls memory allocation, so its incorrect to assume that Game X needs Memory Y. Memory compression, buffer allocations, and caching architectures all impact a game’s memory footprint, and we are tuning to ensure 4GB will always be sufficient for 4K gaming. Main point being that HBM can be thought of as a giant embedded cache, and is not directly comparable to GDDR5 sizes.

You can compare GDDR5 capacity with VRAM capacity of HBM memory. If the GPU runs out of VRAM, what happens in both scenarios? It has to swap out of memory, no matter if it is GDDR5 or HBM, the result is the same.

Who is Built for 4K? You Tell Us

To make a video card that is built for 4K gaming some basic things need to happen. First, the GPU must be fast, it must be able to handle high resolutions and pump out the performance needed to push 4K resolution. In terms of pixels, 4K is 8,294,400 pixels. Compare that to 1440p's pixel mass of 3,686,400.

Part of the GPU specification that helps push these pixels are known as the ROPs. NVIDIA scaled up its ROPs with the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and TITAN X up to 96 ROPs. AMD however did not scale up its ROPs compared to the 290X/390X, it is still at 64 ROPs.

NVIDIA sought to up the GeForce GTX 980 Ti to 6GB and the TITAN X to 12GB. This is where a video card needs to be if you are aiming for a video card that is quote: "built for 4K." No current amount of memory bandwidth is going to overcome the physical limitation of VRAM.

NVIDIA also made sure not only DisplayPort 1.2 is on board for 4K 60Hz support but also HDMI 2.0 which is needed for HDMI support of 4K at 60Hz. AMD removed the DVI connections, but then only gave us HDMI 1.4, with no 4K 60Hz support. If, in our opinion, you are going to remove I/O connection options then at least support the latest versions of each connection for the latest resolution and refresh rate support. In this case that would be DisplayPort 1.3 and HDMI 2.0, if only AMD had done that, it would have felt like a more capable 4K card for displays.

Finally, performance must be there. Your video card must perform. So far, in our testing, the AMD Radeon Fury X trails performance of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti even though it is the same price. Add all these facts up, and you tell us which video card is "built for 4K gaming?"

Also I found this.

AMD withdraw KitGuru Fury X sample over ‘negative content’

 

[Desmond]

Looks like AMD will forever be Nvidia's underdog, unless they do some corporate espionage.

 

[warfreak]

The underwhelming performance of AMD will be bad to the GPU market overall. This means we are not going to get 4k gaming in the mainstream anytime soon.
It would be sad to see AMD bow out of competition.

 

[sam_738844]

The underwhelming performance of AMD will be bad to the GPU market overall. This means we are not going to get 4k gaming in the mainstream anytime soon.
It would be sad to see AMD bow out of competition.

4K gaming is not upto speed with the monitors costing nearly half as much the whole setup, costs are coming down though but still not enough. Not nearly enough to justify a market where 1080P is still the mainstream res and 1440P is the ideal sweet spot for gamers.

Now looking at Fury X's performance, it seems AMD have really pushed the card for 4K but at both of those resolutions below, it performs horribly, i mean how is it possible that their flagship card is beaten spectacularly at times across games at lower resolutions when its a supposedly 4K ready card?! Where is the logic behind that? how it is even engineered?

Not sure if AMD needs more money in R&D team or Marketing team

 

[warfreak]

Regardless of reviews, it seems they are doing well w.r.t. sales:

AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X All Sold Out On First Day Of Launch - Online Retailers in Restocking Phase