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.

Comments

Re:This is why I gave up PC gaming

[jandrese]

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.

Re:This is why I gave up PC gaming

[ArcherB]

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.