AMD Reveals More Fury X Details, Including Performance

AMD intended to wait until next week before letting the juiciest bits of Fury X loose, but due to some communication errors, some people jumped embargo. Thus, AMD has decided to lift the veil off of its reviewers’ guide and is letting editors publish any and all details found within its pages. Actual reviews remain under embargo until next Wednesday. Unfortunately, you will not be able to expect one from us.

I tackled Fury X’s specs in my preview article, but for the sake of providing a pretty table, I’ll use AMD’s. Once again, the card includes 4,096 cores, is clocked at 1,050MHz, and delivers 8.6 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance. While the R9 390 cards sport 8GB of VRAM, the high cost and low yield of beefier HBM chips results in Fury X shipping with just 4GB. It’s a super-fast 4GB, however, pushing 512GB/s, versus the 290X’s 320GB/s.

Worth noting is that all of AMD’s new cards support DirectX 12, Vulkan, Mantle, and OpenGL 4.5. Some of these APIs are not supported right now, but will be in future driver updates (which is fine, given content is nonexistent at the moment to end-users).

So, let’s tackle performance.

First and foremost, AMD has shown that with its VSR tech, 1080p users can run games at 4K resolution and achieve the exact same framerates as 4K gamers. This isn’t too surprising, I suppose, but does highlight the fact that VSR will produce an accurate 4K image. Why run 4K on 1080p? For that glorious crispness, of course.

Given its price point of $649, it’s of little surprise that AMD considers NVIDIA’s GTX 980 Ti – also priced at $649 – to be its direct competitor. In 3DMark, AMD shows that it has a slight gain over NVIDIA.

For the tests that really matter – the gaming ones – AMD once again shows its Fury X gaining an edge over the 980 Ti – even in Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (albeit with HairWorks disabled).

AMD also provided results from 3DMark’s DirectX 12 test, but as Futuremark says it shouldn’t be used for comparing different GPU vendors, there’s not much use in talking about them.

During the unveiling of Fury X, AMD said that the card would be an overclockers’ dream, so it included some light results. With a 100MHz overclock, performance was boosted in Witcher 3 by 6%, Sniper Elite 3 by 5%, and Far Cry 4 by 5%.

So there you have it. The Fury X seems to be a bit faster than a 980 Ti, costs the same, and should run at lower temperatures thanks to its included liquid cooler. Things are looking good, so now it’s just a matter of waiting until next week to see the reviews.