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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FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
They can't even supply the dang cores properly, that's why you ONLY SEE SAPPHIRE.Hell you can't even buy them (furyx) at newegg.
So profit would require actual valid production instead of paperlaunched vape.
bill.rookard - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
I'm betting that they can, but the problem is not the 980 which they could match, but as noted in the review, the Fury X. It's a similar issue with the 980ti vs Titan. The 980ti is 60% of the price, but 90+% of the performance. At that point, the ONLY reason to get a Titan is if you need it for FP64 compute.In this case, if they took it to the $500 price point, you'd be in the same boat. 75% of the price for 93% of the performance, and it would really cannibalize the Fury X. Keeping it at $550 makes it an 85% of the price for 93% performance. And, since it does outperform the 980, it should be a bit more expensive.
xenol - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Honestly though, I think AMD should be undercutting themselves a bit to win more of the market share. If I compare the GTX 980 and the R9 Fury, the only problem I see is I take a 10% or so cut to 1080p performance. If the R9 Fury is the same price, then I can forgive the higher power consumption in exchange for better performance at the same price point.I don't think a lot of people consider the top tier cards anyway (not including the Titan, which is ridiculous in and of itself for most consumers).
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Most people are at 1080P, that's WHY NVIDIA optimizes for it.But, the fickle insanity of all the reviewers requires unplayable "compromises" on image quality and frame rates, and the stupid as dog doo fanboy base goes along for the autistic ride.
NVIDIA knows better, there are sane persons such as myself - when spending multiple hundreds on a video card I don't want to "cut doown on settings" and fiddle with the dang thing day and night then test for "playability".
I don't want to waste my life screwing around.
I game 980Ti at 1920x 1200 and it's BARELY ENOUGH to not worry about any settings I want to use, in any game whatsoever - which is of course the most enjoyable thing !
No crashing, no haggling, no constant attempts at optimizing, no cutting down eye candy, no limiting !
Now maybe for someone who wants to hassle with 2 or 3 or 4 cards, a gagggle of cables, likely custom water cooling, a monstruous noise constantly going, then a huge 3k or triplet monitors - then THEY STILL HAVE TO SHUT OFF EYE CANDY AND SETTINGS TO GET A DECENT PLAYABLE FRAME RATE.... THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS YET INADEQUATE.
Sorry, not this gamer. No way, not ever.
extide - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Except the Titan X has crappy FP64 compute, so even that isnt a reason.Hxx - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
completely agree but value wise does not beat the 980 unfortunately which can be had for much less than $500 once you flip the crap batman game.Archie2085 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Hey Ryan..Wondering how much the drop in power consumption is when setting the fan to max speed. Is lekage power significant when making the card run cooler say 65 degs or so? if it can be tested
Thanks
HighTech4US - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
What a worthless review.You use the Reference GTX 980 and don't overclock it or even use one of the many many factory overclocked models available yet there in all your charts is the Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury OC.
I thought the previous review was brown nosing AMD but this one even out does that one.
HighTech4US - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
EVGA 04G-P4-2983-KR GeForce GTX 980 Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 SLI Support Video CardCore Clock: 1266MHz
Boost Clock: 1367MHz
Available today for $507.99 or 487.99 after $20 rebate card.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
K_Space - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Nonesense. I'm not sure what review you glossed over but this was a fantastic read. I'm oggling over the Sapphire's noise results, quite phenomenomal.RE: OC versus stock cards. This seem to be a ?policy ?protocol of many review sites and not just Anandtech. If you been on the site long enough you'd know it doesn't it apply to this review only: flick back to the 980 and 980Ti reviews you'll see the OC'd card under review tested against stock counterparts. It's not Anandtech either. Hexus does exactly the same (they OC'd the alraedy overclocked phenomenal 980 Ti G1 from Gigabyte versus stock models; it trashed the 295x2). It's annoying to keep flicking in between to check all the oc'd results but to bash the whole review is unfair to say the least.