The 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
Meet The ASUS STRIX R9 Fury Battlefield 4
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  • Asomething - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Amd knows this and already made some decent leaps from gcn1.1 to gcn1.2 but nvidia are still way ahead on geometry.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    Mr know it all sure read well..... didn't you, mr wise meister...
    Thank god you are here with your gigantic brain

    QUOTE: " This indicates that at least for the purposes of the 3DMark test, the R9 Fury series is ROP bottlenecked "

    YEP SURE AIN'T THOSE ROPs !

    64 just like the FURY X, meaning the Fury X is MORE ROP BOTTLENECKED !

    Thanks for playing amd fanboy... it's been so beneficial to have your ultimate knowledge and experience to reign in rumors and place the facts on the table.
  • tviceman - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Hey Ryan -

    Since you've loaded Fury X OC numbers in the the bench database, is there any chance you can load Fury OC, 980 TI OC, and 980 OC numbers as well? Overclocking cards, but choosing not to compare OC'd results against OC'd results of other cards makes it tedious to flip back and fourth. Basically I want to see your 980 OC'd results vs. Fury OC'd results and going all the way back to the 980 launch isn't ideal since there have been driver improvements and game performance improving patches as well.
  • deppman - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    I agree. The common practice of showing factory OC'd cards against reference designs is misleading. Showing an EVGA factory clocked 980 versus a Sapphire factory clocked Fury is a more realistic comparison. A factory OC'd 980 probably matches or beats the Fury at the same price. But I can't determine that here because there is no comparison :(
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    The Fury OC results actually aren't supposed to be live. That's an error.

    The problem with putting OC results in Bench is that we don't keep them updated. So they would quickly grow stale and not be valid results.
  • darkfalz - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link

    The main problem with putting OC results in bench is YMMV. I've yet to get a card that's overclocked as well as the reviewed version (granted, you tend to find faults weeks or months after, whereas in a review they only need to be "stable" for that few days or a week during the review). Unigine Valley at Ultra / 4K DSR is a really good test for me.
  • deppman - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link

    "The main problem with putting OC results in bench is YMMV"

    This is true if you personally overclock the card. However, the Sapphire is "factory clocked" higher and is guaranteed and warrantied at that clock - and it also performs better as a result. The EVGA GTX 980 Superclocked ACX 2.0 with a factory clock of 1266/1367MHz (about 10% above reference) is also guaranteed and warrantied at those clocks.

    Including a card like this in the benchmarks would provide a real-world comparison to the Sapphire. At the very least it should at least be *mentioned* in the OC section or conclusions. Something like "Of course, the real elephants in the room are the GTX 980's from board partners like EVGA which are clocked 10% or more above reference. Maxwell has proven to scale very well with clock speed, and these should provide comparable or better performance than the Sapphire for nearly $100 less at current prices."
  • xenol - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    I felt like AMD should've released this at $500 and put NVIDIA in a bit of a bind in that market sector.
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    AMD isn't in a position where they can afford to lose money on these cards.
  • extide - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    I HIGHLY doubt they would lose money at $500, however they definitely do want to get every last penny they can.

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