AMD Radeon R9 Fury reviews

DigitalFoundry's full review is out. Cards look heavily bottlenecked at 1080p with 390X neck and neck with Fiji chips in some games.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-amd-radeon-r9-fury-review

Two important takeaways for me,

We've also included some data we have from a factory-overclocked GTX 980 (MSI's Gaming 4G model). We're missing Witcher benches here, but that doesn't really matter - the fact is that the 980 just doesn't scale well at 4K.
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and,

There have been theories that AMD's slower DX11 driver may be to blame for the poor showings at lower resolutions. However, if that were the case, we would expect Fury and Fury X to perform at the same level at 1080p and 1440p as CPU would become the bottleneck rather than the GPU hardware - this does not happen: the top-tier card is still faster and once again, overclocking brings us pretty close to overall parity. Curiously, we actually find that Far Cry 4 is faster on Fury than it was when we tested it on Fury X - substantially so, in fact. We must assume a fault of some kind in our test, or an optimisation in the 15.7 driver vs the 15.15 we had to test with the Fury X.
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So, the front-end seems to be the bigger culprit than CPU bottleneck and apparently the 15.7 do have improvement for FC4 as that hardwarezone guy saw, but not where it matters the most for Fury.
 
gamervivek said:
So, the front-end seems to be the bigger culprit than CPU bottleneck...
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Unlikely that you'd have seen Mantle / DX12 test gains if that were the case.

Even at 1080p a lot of titles are not going to be 100% CPU bound, there are going to be frames, or parts of frames, that are still GPU bound. This is why the old B3D fillrate graphs were so useful...
 
Well, digitalfoundry actually were the ones going on strongly about how AMD's dx11 drivers aren't upto snuff. Their usage of the draw calls bench was posted a couple of months back along with reviews pairing similar performance AMD and nvidia cards with i3.

Techreport do use B3D tests, and I think hardware.fr are quite comprehensive with their test suit, but the question would be then how to go about distinguishing the CPU bottleneck from the bottleneck within GPU. I remember it being rather clear cut with 5870 and 5770 tying due to heavy usage of tessellation in some game.
 
gamervivek said:
Techreport do use B3D tests, and I think hardware.fr are quite comprehensive with their test suit, but the question would be then how to go about distinguishing the CPU bottleneck from the bottleneck within GPU.
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It's not just the tests it's how you present the data. The correlation between measured fillrate and resolution is a good indicator of where the bottleneck lies. High correlation = cpu or frontend bottleneck. Low correlation = ROP or shader bottleneck.
 
Project Cars is not an isolated incident and I don't think we should pretend it is. I've had a 970 (formerly 670) running beside a 7950 for some years now and I can say with absolute certainty that NVIDIA has better support of new games.

A while back I stopped buying games on release day for other reasons but I've found that the AMD card can have issues in some games even weeks after release. It's rare but it happens.
 
Rys said:
Scott revised his final conclusion with a new view on the data that excludes Project Cars (I guess for those people that are unable to operate a spreadsheet or think for themselves :runaway: )

http://techreport.com/blog/28624/reconsidering-the-overall-index-in-our-radeon-r9-fury-review
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Its funny, when i read his 99th percentile results vs the one made with FCAT on other review ( like the Guru3D one as example ), i dont know.. http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asus_radeon_r9_fury_strix_review,27.html The only problem i see is on the witcher3.. nothing who couldnt be fixed
 
pharma said:
MSI R9 390X GAMING vs ASUS STRIX R9 Fury Review
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/07/13/msi_r9_390x_gaming_vs_asus_strix_fury_review
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Like I mentioned before, the Fury's biggest problem right now is the 390X and not the GTX 980. Take away the cases where tesselation performance becomes a bottleneck (FC4 godrays, Witcher 3 Hairworks) and the difference between the two goes down to 5-10%.

No wonder they had to jack up the prices for the Hawaii cards. With the 15.7 drivers, the 290X's performance for ~$300 would render the aircooled Fury a complete nonsense at $550.
 
R9 Fury two partner launch comes at what cost?

Speaking with AMD partners today it’s become clear that we’ll be seeing companies like GIGABYTE, MSI, PowerColor and more offer variants of the R9 Fury. When? Well that still remains a bit up in the air. While this isn’t really shocking news, we would highly doubt AMD would ignore so many partners on its new “Fiji” based card, everything becomes more interesting when you start to talk to companies about why they’ve been ignored.

Yield rates, yield rates and yield rates are constantly mentioned. While ASUS nor Sapphire want to tell anyone how many cards they got, it safe to say that the quantity isn’t what they would hope. This is painfully obvious as we see companies not happy with R9 Fury X quantities. The biggest issue relating to how AMD has launched the Radeon R9 Fury is the alienating of other partners.

High Bandwidth Memory and yield rates of the “Fiji” GPU continue to be the companies Achilles heel. AMD seem to be going down a path that could become very messy very quickly. We’ll be keeping our ear to the ground on this one as we try and figure out what’s going on with the two partner launch.
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http://www.hardwareluxx.com/index.p...ry-two-partner-launch-comes-at-what-cost.html
 
I'm wondering if AMD has a hard time optimizing some parts of its drivers or took the decision not to spend resources to try to match Nvidia's lower D3D11 overhead / better multithreading. Development resources are always limited and right now maybe it's best to direct most of those resources towards the future even if it means accepting Nvidia will have the edge in some games for a while.

Btw, inside the R9 Fury review, I had a small extra fight in 1440p : Fiji XT/Pro vs GM200 400/310 at the same clock. In turns out that Fiji and GM200 have the same performances in half of the games I tested (Batman AO, Crysis 3, Evolve, Far Cry 4, Hitman Absolution and Tomb Raider) while the GM200 has a 10-30% advantage in the other half (Anno 2070, Battlefield 4, Dying Light, GRID 2, Splinter Cell and The Witcher 3).
 
Good to see Hardware.fr included results from a Hybrid GTX 980 Ti (Inno3D GTX 980 Ti iChill Black). I think a first ...
 
Tridam said:
I'm wondering if AMD has a hard time optimizing some parts of its drivers or took the decision not to spend resources to try to match Nvidia's lower D3D11 overhead / better multithreading. Development resources are always limited and right now maybe it's best to direct most of those resources towards the future even if it means accepting Nvidia will have the edge in some games for a while.

Btw, inside the R9 Fury review, I had a small extra fight in 1440p : Fiji XT/Pro vs GM200 400/310 at the same clock. In turns out that Fiji and GM200 have the same performances in half of the games I tested (Batman AO, Crysis 3, Evolve, Far Cry 4, Hitman Absolution and Tomb Raider) while the GM200 has a 10-30% advantage in the other half (Anno 2070, Battlefield 4, Dying Light, GRID 2, Splinter Cell and The Witcher 3).
Click to expand...

(A little) offtopic: Thank you so much Damien for your (always) profesional reviews ...Your hard and trustful work @hardware.fr was of great help to me from many years in a world (...wide web) where "astroturfing" is more common nowadays than leaves in the trees ...

Allez les bleus!
 
So, for 1080p, and sometimes down-sampling from 1440p. Which should I get? R9 Fury is $75 more on average here in Montreal than a 980 G1 Gaming(which is what I plan to get).
 
Dave Baumann said:
Unlikely that you'd have seen Mantle / DX12 test gains if that were the case.

Even at 1080p a lot of titles are not going to be 100% CPU bound, there are going to be frames, or parts of frames, that are still GPU bound. This is why the old B3D fillrate graphs were so useful...
Click to expand...

I was wondering, do you know why so many Mantle reviews show Fuji having issues with Mantle games? It seems to be a big plus in favor of the 390X if you compare the 390X and the R9 Fury...
 
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