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.

Comments

Sigh. 28nm...

[Jahoda]

..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.

Re:First to say

[PopeRatzo]

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.

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?

Performance only par at 4K

[Fallen Kell]

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.