The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Review, Feat. Sapphire & ASUS
by Ryan Smith on July 10, 2015 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 4
The next game in our 2015 GPU benchmark suite is Far Cry 4, Ubisoft’s Himalayan action game. A lot like Crysis 3, Far Cry 4 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with Ultra settings thanks to the game’s expansive environments.
Like The Talos Principle, Far Cry 4 is another game that has traditionally favored AMD cards, and as a result the R9 Fury looks quite good here. On a relative basis it’s ahead of the GTX 980 by 33% at 4K and 22% at 1440. On an absolute basis this is enough to keep the average framerate above 60fps at 1440, something the GTX 980 could not do, and above 40fps at 4K.
Shifting gears, comparing the R9 Fury to the 290X paints the R9 Fury in a more favorable light than earlier, but it’s still not great. The performance advantage for AMD’s new card tops out at 26% here, which isn't poor, but at the same time is not all that great given the fact that it has been almost 2 years now since the 290X launched at the same price point.
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Shadow7037932 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Yes! Been waiting for this review for a while.Drumsticks - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Indeed! Good that it came out so early too :DI'm curious @anandtech in general, given the likely newer state of the city/X's drivers, do you think that the performance deltas between each fury card and the respective nvidia will swing further or into AMD's favor as they solidify their drivers?
Samus - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
So basically if you have $500 to spend on a video card, get the Fury, if you have $600, get the 980 Ti. Unless you want something liquid cooled/quiet, then the Fury X could be an attractive albeit slower option.Driver optimizations will only make the Fury better in the long run as well, since the 980Ti (Maxwell 2) drivers are already well optimized as it is a pretty mature architecture.
I find it astonishing you can hack off 15% of a cards resources and only lose 6% performance. AMD clearly has a very good (but power hungry) architecture here.
witeken - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
No, not at all. You must look at it the other way around: Fury X has 15% more resources, but is <<15% faster.0razor1 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Smart , you :) :D This thing is clearly not balanced. That's all there is to it. I'd say x for the WC at 100$ more make prime logic.thomascheng - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Balance is not very conclusive. There are games that take advantage of the higher resources and blows past the 980Ti and there are games that don't and therefore slower. Most likely due to developers not having access to Fury and it's resources before. I would say, no games uses that many shading units and you won't see a benefit until games do. The same with HBM.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
What a pathetic excuse, apologists for amd are so sad.AMD got it wrong, and the proof is already evident.
No, NONE OF US can expect anandtech to be honest about that, nor it's myriad of amd fanboys,
but we can all be absolutely certain that if it was nVidia whom had done it, a full 2 pages would be dedicated to their massive mistake.
I've seen it a dozen times here over ten years.
When will you excuse lie artists ever face reality and stop insulting everyone else with AMD marketing wet dreams coming out of your keyboards ?
Will you ever ?
redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
And you are not an nividia fanboy are you? Hypocrite.redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Typical fanboy, ignore the points and go straight to name calling. No, you are the one people shold be sad about, delusional that they are not a fanboy when they are.redraider89 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Proof that intel and nvidia wackos are the worst type of people, arrogant, snide, insulting, childish. You are the poster boy for an intel/nvidia sophomoric fanboy.