New cards from AMD in two weeks ?

Bishoff said:

Don't you just love the Graphics company's own cherry picked performance comparisons? Enjoy! BTW these cards don't have HDMI 2.0 so nothing above 30Hz on your fancy 4K TV's.

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deathman20 said:

Yeah thats from an AMD slide some where. I've seen it around a few places now.

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Fury is an air cooler, fury x is the AIO model. The cards are identical beyond the cooler.

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I thought the Fury and Fury X only differed in the cooling department.

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Value and Conclusion


The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X will retail at $650.
Pros:
Great performance at 4K
Low gaming noise
Compact form factor
Low temperatures
Power efficient gaming
HBM memory, tons of bandwidth
Multi-monitor power consumption greatly improved
Backplate included
ZeroCore power
Dual-BIOS
Support for AMD FreeSync
Supports AMD Virtual Super Resolution and Framerate Target Control

Cons:
Slower than expected in sub-4K resolutions
Pump emits permanent high-pitched whine
Some coil noise
Could be much quieter in idle
4 GB of VRAM
Lack of HDMI 2.0
No memory overclocking
Radiator takes up extra space
No DVI / analog VGA outputs
Overall Score: 9.2

Conclusion:
Finally it is here! AMD has released their first new high-end GPU in one and a half years. The new Fiji silicon's architecture is based on Tonga, but with twice the amount of shaders and support for HBM memory. HBM is the way forward for graphics cards memory, it offers very high bandwidth, in a very compact form factor with large improvements to power consumption.

When run through our benchmarks the R9 Fury X shines at 4K resolution, almost matching GTX 980 Ti, with just 3% difference. NVIDIA's GTX Titan X is still 8% ahead, but the performance is extremely game dependent. Most of our titles have the Fury X head to head with NVIDIA's offerings, sometimes slightly ahead, but then there are some games where the Radeon falls behind a lot. If we cherry pick and exclude Project Cars or World of Warcraft, then Fury X almost exactly matches GTX 980 Ti - at 4K, but consider that the next game that comes out and that you want to play might have similar troubles. As soon as we start looking at lower resolutions, the performance gap suddenly widens. 4K, vs. GTX 980 Ti: -2%, 1440p: -9%, 1080p: -14%, 900p: -18%. This means that for anything below 4K gaming, which includes 1440p, the Fury X can not compete with NVIDIA's offerings. So if you are thinking about 144 Hz 1080p gaming, then GTX 980 Ti is the way to go now. For 4K gaming the Fury is good though, and it looks like AMD's driver team has gotten more active, too, a driver for Batman: Arkham Knight was released shortly after the game's launch, a welcome improvement that will hopefully last.

AMD's Fury X comes with "only" 4 GB of HBM memory, which is a technological limitation, there are no bigger HBM chips available at this time. My numbers show that at this time there is no need for more than 4 GB of VRAM, when targeting playable framerates. While I can't predict the future, I doubt properly optimized games will need more than that. Sure, there will be lazy game developers that just fill up all VRAM with junk that is never needed, but these will be the exception, not the norm. The bigger issue for AMD here is perception from the less-educated user base, I'm sure forums will be full of "don't buy Fury X, 4 GB VRAM is not enough" posts, that might affect the buying decisions of consumer-level gamers. On the other hand, 6 GB on the GTX 980 Ti is more, no matter how you look at it, which in some way is more future-proof because you would be immune against these odd titles with exceedingly large VRAM usage.

AMD's previous "Hawaii" cards were notorious for their high power draw, which required large powerful thermal solutions to keep temperatures at acceptable levels. Fiji is different here. It comes with improved power consumption, in large part thanks to HBM memory, but the GPU has also seen improvements, which overall result in a 30% improvement in gaming efficiency. I'm also happy to report that multi-monitor power consumption is finally at sane levels, but Blu-ray power draw is still quite high. Overall AMD has caught up to NVIDIA Maxwell's power efficiency, getting close, without beating it.
AMD has still opted for a watercooling solution, which is not the worst move. NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti and Titan X reference designs were far from quiet, Radeon Fury X is much quieter during gaming and runs extremely cool, reaching only 60°C during gaming. However, I feel like the watercooler isn't the ideal implementation, the pump emits an annoying high-pitched whine, that definitely creates more frustration than the fan, which is running very quiet. In addition to that, the card exhibits some coil noise, depending on the game and framerate, but it's definitely there, and combined the two effectively overpower the fan's noise levels. Idle fan noise could also be lower, and in Zero-core neither the fan nor the pump turn off completely. Recent NVIDIA cards introduced an idle-fan off mechanism, which is also missing on the Radeon.

Combined, the improvements from HBM memory and watercooling enabled AMD to create a super-compact card that's only 19 cm long. This means you can build a compact low-noise gaming PC, for the living room, that has enough power to play all the latest games. However, the HDMI output is only version 1.4a, which means your UltraHD TV will only be driven at 30 Hz, which isn't enough for serious gaming. A minor drawback of the watercooler is that you need to mount the radiator somewhere, which could become an issue in really small cases or cases that already have watercooling. The watercooling loop comes pre-filled and is maintenance-free, with sleeved tubing which is extremely kink resistant, so newbies: don't be afraid.

Overclocking potential of the card is slim, and memory overclocking has been disabled completely. I suspect that the BIOS & driver just haven't been designed for memory overclocking at this early stage of HBM usage. I'm also not sure if there is any benefit at all from overclocking HBM memory, because bandwidth seems plenty. What I am more concerned about is the limited GPU overclocking potential. The GM200 GPU on GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Titan X overclocks much better, which means that with both cards overclocked to the max, GTX 980 Ti will have a large performance lead over an overclocked Fury X.

AMD's pricing of $650 for the Fury X matches that of GeForce GTX 980 Ti exactly. I'm not fully convinced that Fury X can win at this price level. While the card introduces cool new technology like HBM and watercooling, in a compact form factor, its performance is not high enough to conclusively beat NVIDIA's offerings, especially the factory overclocked models. The low gaming noise is a definite plus, but it is offset by the pump noise, higher idle noise and the fact that custom, slightly more expensive, GTX 980 Ti designs will certainly reach similar noise levels - with air cooling. Just like Titan X, AMD does not allow any custom variants of the Fury X, but NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti is being customized by all of their board partners, which means individual products can be targeted a more specific needs of a smaller customer segment.

I think a more appropriate price point for the Fury X would be $599, but this raises the question of supply and demand. If we go by the extremely limited amount of samples, and the even shorter time we had to write the review, there's not gonna be many of them, on the other hand we hear of retailers that have stock available today.

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