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AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Launched, Independent Benchmarks, HBM Put To the Test

MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched the Radeon R9 Fury X based on their next generation Fiji GPU and HBM 3D stacked DRAM memory. Fiji is manufactured using TSMC's 28nm process. At its reference clocks of 1050MHz (GPU) and 500MHz (HBM), Fiji and the Radeon R9 Fury X offer peak compute performance of 8.6 TFLOPs, up to 268.8 GT/s of texture fill-rate, 67.2 GP/s of pixel fill-rate, and a whopping 512GB/s of memory bandwidth, thanks to HBM. Its compute performance, memory bandwidth, and textured fill-rate are huge upgrades over the previous generation AMD Hawaii GPU and even outpace NVIDIA's GM200, which powers the GeForce Titan X and 980 Ti. To keep the entire assembly cool, AMD strapped a close-loop liquid cooler onto the Fury X. There's a reason AMD went that route on this card, and it's not because they had to. There will be air-cooled Fury and Fury Nano cards coming in a few weeks that feature fully-functional Fiji GPUs. What the high-powered liquid-cooler on the Fury X does is allow the use of an ultra-quiet fan, with the side benefit of keeping the GPU very cool under both idle and load conditions(around 60C max under load and 30C at idle), which helps reduce overall power consumption by limiting leakage current. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X performed very well in the benchmarks, and remained competitive with a similarly priced, reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but it wasn't a clear win. Generally speaking, the Fury X was the faster of the two cards at 2560x1440. With the resolution cranked up to 3840x2160, however, the Fury X and 980 Ti trade victories.

6 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is why I gave up PC gaming by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I buy my video games for a couple of bucks when Steam has a Black Friday sale. Most games are five years old, but my current gen video card that I got for $60 runs them just fine.

  2. Re:This is why I gave up PC gaming by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You don't need to buy this card if you're happy gaming at console resolutions. Even 6 year old midrange cards can push modern games just fine if you're willing to accept 720p at 30hz. You can even hook up the controller to your PC if you hate the easy precision of a mouse.

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    I read the internet for the articles.
  3. Re:This is why I gave up PC gaming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    -1, Troll (Or retarded)

    Your solution is to ditch your 2015 your 2013 gaming system (Current year minus two) for a console that, if you crunch the nubmers, is as about as powerful as a low-mid grade gaming PC from 2010. You can say this objectively because current game consoles now use (customized) PC hardware.

    The two year upgrade cycle hasn't been true since the early 2000s at best. You can game quite comfortably on 5.

    With consoles you also get to enjoy:
    Closed walled gardens

    Inflated prices

    Fewer available games

    Lack of KB/Mouse input

    Screaming 10 year olds

    Paying for the privilege to play online games

  4. Re:Funny .... by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's in the nature of fanboys. But I was positively surprised by this card, I was expecting them to come in much more power hungry and hotter due to the liquid cooling. That this was like their 220W CPU stunt with the FX-9590, a 3-400W card just to match performance at the cost of everything else. Instead it's nearly a match on power (275W vs 250W), the cooling is quiet and while it adds a radiator it's shorter making cabling easier. For all the people who want to give AMD a fighting chance, this is a competitive offer that you don't have to excuse to buy.

    That said, I wonder how much it'll add to AMDs bottom line as that $650 price tag is probably quite a lot less than they hoped for, availability at least for reviews is also reportedly slim. But still, this is probably the best launch AMD has had since 2013 and I hope they can push out the rest of the lineup and leave the 300 series behind as soon as possible. Particularly the R9 nano could hit a more mainstream market, the Fury/Fury X only support a small - but profitable - segment. They need high volume cards too though, according to the Steam survey the GTX 970 has been selling 3.5x the volume as the GTX 980.

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    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  5. Re:This is why I gave up PC gaming by ArcherB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think he just likes the fact that he can go to the store, buy any game with his console's name on it, and it is guaranteed to work. He doesn't need to worry about having the right OS, the right amount of RAM, the right processor, the right video card, the drivers, and so on. Of course, even if his system is set up perfectly today, the specs will change as his machine ages. In other words, a video card that will play any game today, will not play any game in three years. A PlayStation Three still plays every single game made for a PS3, from the games that came with the system on launch day to the games that are still being released today.

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    There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
  6. Re:Funny .... by Guppy · · Score: 3, Informative

    If those cheesy little plastic connectors they're using inside of the package to route coolant to the radiator fail, they might wreck more than that.

    Apparently AMD contracted that part out to Cooler Master, which has a fair bit of experience with liquid cooling design. Should be ok.