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Air-Cooled AMD Radeon R9 Fury Arrives For $100 Less With Fury X-Like Performance
MojoKid writes: When AMD launched the liquid-cooled Radeon Fury X, it was obvious the was company willing to commit to new architecture and bleeding edge technologies (Fiji and High-Bandwidth Memory, respectively). However, it fell shy of the mark that enthusiasts hoped it would achieve, unable to quite deliver a definitive victory against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti. However, AMD just launched their Radeon R9 Fury (no "X" and sometimes referred to as "Fury Air"), a graphics card that brings a more compelling value proposition to the table. It's the Fury release that should give AMD a competitive edge against NVIDIA in the $500+ graphics card bracket. AMD's Radeon R9 Fury's basic specs are mostly identical to the liquid-cooled flagship Fury X, except for two important distinctions. There's a 50MHz reduction in GPU clock speed to 1000MHz, and 512 fewer stream processors for a total of 3584, versus what Fury X has on board. Here's the interesting news which the benchmark results demonstrate: In price the Fury veers closer to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, but in performance it sneaks in awfully close to the GTX 980 Ti.
I use Linux, so I'm well aware of the godawful situation that exists when trying to use new, high-end graphics hardware. I've always found it to be a brutal fight with drivers, kernel modules, and X configuration. It's not like Windows, where the new hardware is immediately usable to its full potential.
When the fuck will somebody like me, an average Linux user, be able to make use of new hardware like this without enduring so much pain and suffering? When will I be able to use a windowing system that's as sleek as OS X's?
I keep hearing about Wayland and Mir, but after so many years I still can't use either on a daily basis!
When will the Linux desktop and graphics experience be at least as good and as seamless as the experiences that Windows and OS X offered a decade ago? It surely isn't today, and it doesn't even look like it will happen during the remainder of this year. So when will it happen?
Depends on the resolution. 1440p and even 4k monitors are becoming more common and you need the extra power. It will be interesting to see how Dx12 will impact performance too.
Don't forget high-fps monitors, which is an even harder problem to solve than resolution. I've got an overclocked Geforce 980 Ti (faster than the Fury X) and it still can't manage 1080p @ 144hz in many games.
Why do I care?
..and just like Nvidia, still using .28nm process for the GPU, same as it has been since ~2010-2011... by "technology standards", this is and incredibly long period of time. I totally understand the issues with supply from TSMC, Samsung, etc, and that the products of "latest-and-greatest" in chip fabrication are supplying the smart phone and tablet industry as fast as they can.... But my point is that these days, every time I see either AMD or Nvidia releasing yet another hot and power-hungry rehash, I sadly shake my head. Gigs and gigs of RAM are great - so is 1440p and 60 fps, but I want lower-power consumption and I want less heat. I don't want increasingly complicated cooling solutions.
as most 50 inch+ 4k tv's don't come with with displayport, but with a hdmi 2.0 port, and 4k pc monitors don't come in usefull sizes and prices. This card isn't worth looking at for me.
Perhaps for current-day games, but the proposed specifications for the commercial Oculus Rift are quite high (and that's just the "recommended" specs): https://www.oculus.com/en-us/b...
The high-end cards of today will be the mid-high range cards of next year, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more demanding VR games make full use of the available power.
Does it have good Linux drivers? I.e. that have the same performance, memory requirements etc. that the windows counterpart? Doesn't have to be free, only good.
No? Then I'm not interested...
Stefan Axelsson
You ma'am win the thread. Mod parent up. *tips hat*
Benchmarks mean nothing when so many games have extra bugs with AMD products. They really need to do something about building up a reputation for stable drivers that offer stable performance, even for new games. Because right now, raw performance means dick to the customers when it comes to crashes and poor FPS.
You're a whiny zealot. Companies don't cooperate with you folks because no matter what you will bitch and cry about something. So in the end its easier to just not deal with the one in a million Linux users.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
That's because manufacturers run into limits, especially around cost, since Moore's law has reached the end of the line. A transistor on 20nm or 14nm is more expensive than a transistor on 28nm.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'm starting to think I'm getting old and am the only person who doesn't give a shit about the Occulus Rift or any other VR setups, at least not yet. Seriously, I've always been a graphics junkie, since the days when CGA was the standard for color, and I really am quite happy right now with 1080p on a flat screen.
I've got a 1440 and can quite easily have a shitty experience if I select the wrong settings (2x770GTX 4Gb).
Still, I'm happy as larry that the PC world has finally decided to leave 1080 panels behind. I was running higher res than 1080 for years, and then those pesky TV panels turned up everywhere and put us back years.
My old-ass eyes can barely tell the difference between 1080 and 4k. Give me a nice big monitor, and a game that runs smoothly (which apparently is hard for some companies *arkham knight*) and I don't really need to spend the money on two Titans. Who decided that we need photorealism in games, anyway?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Who decided that we need photorealism in games, anyway?
You did. When you go out and buy these $200+ cards and fancy ass graphics batman games, YOU'RE telling the industry that's what you want.
Else you'd be happy using integrated graphics and playing solitaire and not bitching about the state of high end graphics and AAA games.
Pretty much big agreement to that statement. I'm happily running my AMD FX-4170 with Crossfire 6850s, 16gb RAM, and a OCZ agility 3 / 120. My computer runs very smoothly and I can play a ton of games at their high settings. I stop buying the high end cards a while ago and now just upgrade every 4 years. I just felt it wasn't worth the money to constantly do the upgrade game unless I truly needed the power for something and that was usually for work.
Yeah, if you don't like it, talk to TSMC (and maybe Samsung), and the people that supply them. This isn't NVIDIA's fault, and AMD/ATI is in the exact same boat, so quit whining.
Think Borderlands / TF2, with simpler cartoon-like graphics. Fast, fun.
Fancy ass Arkham City didn't need a $200+ video card.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not to mention the cores are huge so yield rate is likely very touchy.
Who decided that we need photorealism in games, anyway?
The developers did, to make up for not really adding any new gameplay or content. They want to sell 'the next big thing' without really needing to do anything but reiterate the old stuff at higher rez.
What is really interesting to me about these aircooled Fury cards is that even though the PCB of the card is much shorter than that of a typical flagship GPU card the heatsinks being use extend the card length out to the typical 12" length. Why is that interesting you say? the power consumption of the card is on par with other AMD GCN cards and when it comes to dissipating the associated heat it still requires the same mass of copper and aluminum fins to avoid temperature spikes the associated fan acceleration. On a long enough timeline it seems to me the reliability of this card will be noteworthy in comparison to other cards using a more typical memory and cooling configuration.
The Fury is really only competitive at 4K resolution. At lower resolutions 1440p, 1080p, etc., it gets beat pretty bad in pretty much every game out there (save for a very small handful) by the 980 and 980 TI. Given that the majority of monitors out there are still 1080p or 1440p it is hard to recommend this card.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Comment is too short.
My old-ass eyes can barely tell the difference between 1080 and 4k. Give me a nice big monitor, and a game that runs smoothly (which apparently is hard for some companies *arkham knight*) and I don't really need to spend the money on two Titans. Who decided that we need photorealism in games, anyway?
Even newer TVs are getting too sharp for my liking, I feel that my 2-year old plasma gives a more cinematic experience than my dad's slightly newer LED screen that makes everything look like a damn documentary.
This, nvidia is playing the market with their "features" aka scams. Buy a 400-500 dollar for a poorly optimizer game? Wtf is this bs lol
I guess it's just the way the engineering played out. Basically everyone except Intel is stuck on 28nm, so there's not much to work with... might as well pay your engineers to rig up a way to deal with all that heat. At least AMD is putting effective coolers on their cards instead of nVidia just putting the "prettiest" blower on there.
I don't really share your want for lower-power graphics cards though. These are *desktop* parts connected to the electrical mains. I don't live in communist germany where electricity costs 3-4x as much as it should, the cost is negligible for me; all I care about is maximum performance per unit cost; if that means a 1.2 kW system then so be it!
Aye, more like a $25 or $50 card... or hell,$0 with on-board graphics on a laptop.
It's not a notebook GPU. It is a desktop GPU. Why would you be worrying about power consumption and heat? This is marketed toward PCs.
Oh, you're paying for the on-board graphics. You can't NOT pay for it, because Intel welded it to the CPU.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
So turn off smoothing. It's a function of the tv, and takes about 10 seconds to turn off. I personally hate the feature, it makes movies look like they were filmed for basic cable tv.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
You should get some cough mixture for that cough. It sounds terrible.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
In the last years, Nvidia have made big strides in reducing their power consumption for a given performance. You can buy the "latest-and-greatest" in performance, which will outperform older cards, OR you can get similar performance in a smaller, cooler and cheaper package. The 750Ti comes to mind:
It is "only" a midrange card, but with a power consumption of 60-70W it does not even need an additional PCIe power connector.
Recently, AMD are also getting closer with HBM on the Fury (although they are still falling a bit short of Nvidia).
If you think back a few years, the roles were reversed BTW:
Nvidia was still on the Fermi (also derided as "Thermi") architecture and significantly less efficient than AMD's HD5xxx series.
Looking forward, the .14nm process is supposed to come out in 2016 and HBM is supposed to get its 2nd generation. I think those will be good times.
C - the footgun of programming languages
It's not a notebook GPU. It is a desktop GPU. Why would you be worrying about power consumption and heat? This is marketed toward PCs.
BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO SHOUT OVER ALL THIS FAN NOISE!
Well, the noise issue is mostly solved with aftermarket coolers, but that still leaves power consumption and heat. I guess none of this matters for the occasional gamer, but if you do productive work on GPUs 24/7, and (gasp) pay for your electricity, then these things matter.
(I've been building silent, often fanless computers since about 2003, since I simply don't want any extra noise where I live. Besides, I've never understood why it's OK to waste energy willy-nilly just because it's plugged in. Most of my computers have "laptop" parts in "desktop" cases for the best combination of low power consumption and cooling.)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
"BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO SHOUT OVER ALL THIS FAN NOISE! "
Son, unless you're running Delta fans, you have no right to say shit about noise.
I've got a single delta fan louder than a QUAD SLI TITAN setup.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Fury clearly beats 980 at 1440p and is closer to 980Ti-s than to 980 performance.
http://anandtech.com/show/9421...
Despite being a decent middle-range card and likely still a good value the 750Ti isn't a stand-out on power efficiency. At this time hexus.net puts the Fury X at the best GLOPS/W rating of 31.28, which is a good bit better than the 750Ti at 23.15 and slightly edges out the GTX980 at 30.19 (also interesting that the newer GTX980Ti has a worse rating of 24.24 GFLOPS/W).
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/84512-sapphire-radeon-r9-fury-tri-x-oc/
I'm still a bit surprised that the 750Ti doesn't come with a PCIe power connector as in many cases the motherboard connector is only rated for 25W.
I usually go by the performance index of www.3dcenter.org, which gives an average performance value relative to the Radeon HD 5750/6750 GDDR5, which is defined as 100%.
The index is not based on theoretical GFLOPS, but on tests by various review sites (mostly gaming) and calculated for benchmark results at 1920x1080 with 4x multisampling anti-aliasing.
This explains why Nvidia looks better in the 3dcenter.org ranking, as they usually get more gaming performance out of cards with the same GFLOPS.
3dcenter.org also calculates a performance/watt rating where they divide the performance index by the typical power consumption in games. The result is in percent of performance per watt, and as explained above it favors Nvidia. Of course, if you do something other than gaming, your results may differ.
The best result at the moment is for the GTX 980 4GB at 3.45, closely followed by the 750Ti at 3.44. I used the 750Ti as example of a midrange card that still performs quite nicely compared to high end cards of a few years ago. Current market price is 130-145 Euro. The Fury X is listed with a performance per watt of 2.32.
BTW, Wikipedia says that
Full-height cards may increase their power after configuration. They can use up to 75 W (3.3 V Ã-- 3 A + 12 V Ã-- 5.5 A)
Graphics cards manufacturers use that routinely to save a few cent on the extra connector.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Even a blind person can tell the difference between 10-bit and 6-/8-bit color. Find someone who has a Dell UP2414Q (a nice screen that is 4k, 10-bit, and also just 24" - who the fuck has desk space for a 30" screen!?), and teach the old ass eyes a new trick :)