The R9 Fury review thread.

M

Mangler

Well-known member
Anandtech

Bringing this video card review to a close, we’ll start off with how the R9 Fury compares to its bigger sibling, the R9 Fury X. Although looking at the bare specifications of the two cards would suggest they’d be fairly far apart in performance, this is not what we have found. Between 4K and 1440p the R9 Fury’s performance deficit is only 7-8%, noticeably less than what we’d expect given the number of disabled CUs.

In fact a significant amount of the performance gap appears to be from the reduction in clockspeed, and not the number of CUs. And while overclocking can’t recover all of the performance, but it recovers a lot of it. This implies that Fiji on the whole is overweight on shading/texturing resources, as it’s not greatly impacted by having some of those resources cut off.

Consequently I can see why AMD opted to launch the R9 Fury X and R9 Fury separately, and to withhold the latter’s specifications until now, as this level of performance makes R9 Fury a bit of a spoiler for R9 Fury X. 7-8% makes R9 Fury notably slower than R9 Fury X, but it’s also $100 cheaper, or to turn this argument on its head, the last 10% or so that the R9 Fury X offers comes at quite the price premium. This arguably makes the R9 Fury the better value, and not that we’re complaining, but it does put AMD in an awkward spot.

As for the competition, that’s a bit more of a mixed bag. R9 Fury X had to compete with GTX 980 Ti but couldn’t surpass it, which hurt it and make the GTX the safer buy. On the other hand R9 Fury needs to compete with just the older GTX 980, and while it’s by no means a clean sweep for AMD, it’s a good outcome for AMD. The R9 Fury offers between 8% and 17% better performance than the GTX 980, depending on if we’re looking at 4K or 1440p. I don’t believe the R9 Fury is a great 4K card – if you really want 4K, you really need more rendering power at this time – but even at 1440p this is a solid performance lead.
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Hardocp

The Bottom Line

We think we can sum up this entire evaluation with this next sentence. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury is a more positive comparison to GeForce GTX 980 than AMD Radeon R9 Fury X was to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but the AMD Radeon R9 Fury is too expensive for the performance it provides. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is easily a better value than the AMD Radeon R9 Fury.

The ASUS STRIX R9 Fury trades blows with the GeForce GTX 980 depending on the game settings. In fact, in some cases it can be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980. Turning settings up, it is on par at the least, with the GeForce GTX 980. Performance this time isn't the issue. The issue rather, is the price. The GeForce GTX 980 offers a similar gameplay experience, for much less money.

That is of course nothing against ASUS. ASUS has improved its DirectCU design with the new DirectCU III and it really does a great job. The STRIX R9 Fury video card is professionally and thoughtfully constructed.

ASUS has jam packed this video card full of high-end high-quality hardware components. It has even brought back the DVI port for the Fury series. If anything is built with overclocking potential, it is this video card, and we cannot wait to tear into overclocking. We think the potential is there to overtake Fury X if it can overclock well.
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More reviews:

Hardwarecanucks

Hexus

Bit-tech

Tom's hardware

Kitguru

PCWorld

Tweaktown




Judging by this news post, there will be no review from guru3d this week.

Looks like TPU also did not get a card in time.
 
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Furry seems like a decent card for the price. If nvidia drops the price on 980 to 449 or 429 it will really shite on AMD's Cheerios.

Frankly, I would get a 980 and overclock it to make the 8-17% deficit down to about 5% and keep 50 bucks in my pocket.
 
An oced 980 will beat or match it at 100 dollars less. You can get custom 980s on newegg for 480 while these are 580 for the fury air. Another AMD PRICING FAIL, they shouldn't of gimped the card just same card no stupid aio. HELL their own 390x/390 is a way better value.
 
Considering the limited supply of these cards, it probably makes sense of AMD to price them at a premium. As long as they go out of stock within an hour of being posted there's no point in cutting the price.

I agree that from a price/performance standpoint the Fury isn't that compelling, but I expect that can be rectified by a price cut down the road.

I'm still looking forward to seeing how the Nano stacks up. It must be more efficient at lower speed, and it is definitely much smaller.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Yeah and an oced 970 will beat a 980 yet you bought two....
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Had 3 970s before. Not even close to a 980. Smoothness in sli even at 2 vs 2, 3vs3, not the same.

I had 3 ref 970s @ 1450. Tri sli was a stuttering mess. With sli I couldn't even sustain 55 avg fps in unity @ 3440x1440p. With the 980s I have running @ 1600 Daily clock. I was able to run unity well into the 70-80s avg lol. I always OC my cards so you gotta look at oc vs oc. At the 2 res I game at... 21: 1440p and 4k. That "turbo cache" gave me some issues.

I paid 200 bucks to upgrade to 2 very nice 980 kpes. That's a bargain. Out of the 4 980tis I have all of which are hitting 1450 stable btw. Gotta hand it to my 980s still, giving my 980ti sli a run for its money even at 1400mhz sli on them. Need water blocks before I can run more than 2. EK HURRY THE F!
 
Unless AMD decides to take another 6 month break, the fury does seem to be the way to go for multi gpu.

The thing has really exposed SLI.
 
I really want to see Fury and Fury X cfx vs. SLi results from reputable sites. This whole horse shite of SLi scaling on 2 year old games is pissing me off. I need results from latest games.

Link me if you have dying light, GTA V, Witcher 3, Ass Creed Unity, Farcry 4, Batman AK (once game is fixed) etc.
 
nycdarkness said:
An oced 980 will beat or match it at 100 dollars less. You can get custom 980s on newegg for 480 while these are 580 for the fury air. Another AMD PRICING FAIL, they shouldn't of gimped the card just same card no stupid aio. HELL their own 390x/390 is a way better value.
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Looking at NewEgg the prices for a 980 range from around $500 to $650 with the average around $530. There may be rebates or "Price in cart" cards that push that a bit lower, but even so Fury at $550-$580 seems priced fine. When voltage adjustments are available I don't expect the 980 to catch the Fury. I also expect Fury to see more performance gains in the future than a 980 which has had a lot of time to see optimizations.
 
N-Chlamydia said:
Looking at NewEgg the prices for a 980 range from around $500 to $650 with the average around $530. There may be rebates or "Price in cart" cards that push that a bit lower, but even so Fury at $550-$580 seems priced fine. When voltage adjustments are available I don't expect the 980 to catch the Fury. I also expect Fury to see more performance gains in the future than a 980 which has had a lot of time to see optimizations.
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Zotac is 479 no rebate. Most are the 499-509 with a rebate. Looking at those fury numbers, I am say for sure that a 980 oc willl and since you can't even oc a fury by more than a few mhz. 550-580 is a horrific price. These cards have no oc value, voltage unlock or not.
 
In fact a significant amount of the performance gap appears to be from the reduction in clockspeed, and not the number of CUs. And while overclocking can’t recover all of the performance, but it recovers a lot of it. This implies that Fiji on the whole is overweight on shading/texturing resources, as it’s not greatly impacted by having some of those resources cut off.
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Hmm, who else has been saying this...

;)

That being said, it looks like a decent value compared to Fury X.
 
KAC said:
I really want to see Fury and Fury X cfx vs. SLi results from reputable sites. This whole horse shite of SLi scaling on 2 year old games is pissing me off. I need results from latest games.

Link me if you have dying light, GTA V, Witcher 3, Ass Creed Unity, Farcry 4, Batman AK (once game is fixed) etc.
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PCPER has one

http://www.pcper.com/reviews

thers a xfire one for fury x and fury.

However, their game choice is kinda weird. Who cares about infinite and metro these days lol.


Gonna buy 2 Strix fury . Custom pcb at least.
 
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Based on the performance data we are seeing here today, where the AMD Radeon R9 Fury ranges from being 5-30% faster than the GTX 980, I think AMD has released a part that puts a lot of pressure on NVIDIA's GeForce team. It is more expensive, but for $50 you are getting all custom, retail coolers as well as improved performance in the vast majority of our testing.

king shills conclusion.

Interestingly enough from some of the comments here 5-30% faster isn't worth $50... from what ive read so far the the 980 needs a hefty overclock to catch a fury at stock and looses at 4k. Horrific value of course tho

http://www.computerbase.de/2015-07/...st/3/#abschnitt_ultrahdtests_in_3840__2160_4k
 
nycdarkness said:
Zotac is 479 no rebate. Most are the 499-509 with a rebate. Looking at those fury numbers, I am say for sure that a 980 oc willl and since you can't even oc a fury by more than a few mhz. 550-580 is a horrific price. These cards have no oc value, voltage unlock or not.
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I just did a search and most are around $530. There are cards cheaper and more expensive, but that is not the average. So do you expect that the Fury chips will not follow the overclocking norm established by all other recent GCN based AMD cards? Nothing hints at this, so I would imagine that Fury and Fury X should hit the 1200MHz range with voltage applied. I would not expect an OC 980 to catch a 1200MHz Fury. I don't expect a 1200MHz Fury X to catch an OC 980ti either. I also don't expect to see any major gains on the driver front for the 980. Not because of any fault of Nvidias, it's simply a mature chip and Nvidia has generally not shown large gains late in an architectures life (they do a great job optimizing early on).

There's nothing horrific on the value front for the Fury. It is faster right now than it's nearest competitor and priced slightly higher than the average price of that competitor. Even taking the lowest end price of the 980, Fury looks fine. Nvidia itself has a higher delta between the 970 and 980 for similar performance differences. If AMD's past progress on other GCN cards hold true it should age very well. Actually the Fury is probably the best Fiji SKU from an overall perspective.
 
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