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AMD Radeon Fury X Series | HBM, Small Form Factor And Water Cooling | June 16th

Looking for reviews with OC. Thing runs super cool stock.

You'll have to wait until software like MSI Afterburner is updated for the card to allow voltage control. If it were $600 I'd buy one, but at $650 and consistently a bit behind the $650 980 Ti, it's not worth it unless it can overclock very well. In theory it should, but we don't know yet.

AMD usually gets performance together with driver updates over time. Those looking at this card shouldn't be too disheartened. :-(

They do, and I expect them to improve framerates and frametimes moderately over the next few months, as they usually do. But I wouldn't bank $650 on future driver improvements.

So is there any chance that the voltage will be unlocked through a driver update?

It's almost certainly just a matter of time. It may require a BIOS update, a driver update, an update to software like Afterburner, or all three.
I'm surprised AMD didn't have this lined up for reviewers, especially since they knew it was a bit behind the 980 Ti.

I'll be waiting till mid July before I decide which card to get - Fury X or something else (Fury, Nano, a GeForce card). Right now, though I'm gaming at 1080P, I'm still leaning towards one of the Fury cards. Why? It's super quiet, still a hell of a step up over my poor overworked 7970 GHz Edition, and at 1080P it'll keep me going for years. I usually upgrade my gpu every two years - I think a Fury will see me through three years if anything.

I also think the drivers, as is usually the case with AMD, will mature in time, and performance will go up, so I'm not too worried about these benchmarks. And the 1080P scores look really nice to me as is.

I can see myself waiting until late July (Windows 10 / DX 12), which should allow time for proper overclocking results (and perhaps a hint of driver improvements).
I don't think a 980 Ti or Fury X will hold up (comparatively) as well in 3 years as a 7970 did. We'll be on a smaller fab process by then, we'll have entirely new architectures with HBM 2, PCIe 4 will be standard, etc. I personally expect to be at 4K in the next year or so.
 
I don't understand how it can be relatively weaker at 1080p? Surely its all about fillrate and pixels? if it is strong at 4k vs 980ti, it should be similarly strong at 1080p, pushing similar numbers of pixels?

Bottlenecks in games are complicated... client (e.g. the game) interactions with the driver, driver throughput to GPU, GPU stage interactions, fixed function output/write hardware, etc. It's not even necessarily a limitation in AMD's architecture per se, could be this shows a limiting bottleneck in NVIDIAs at higher resolutions.

We call it bottleneck whack-a-mole. You fix one limiting factor, but things don't go any faster. Then you fix another, and hopefully that's the limiting factor, then you get to reassess tradeoffs you made in the first change, etc.
 

Durante

Member
I don't understand how it can be relatively weaker at 1080p? Surely its all about fillrate and pixels? if it is strong at 4k vs 980ti, it should be similarly strong at 1080p, pushing similar numbers of pixels?
As per the above post, it's never simple, but one thing that's for certain going from 4k to 1080p is that your performance will be far more influenced by driver-level (CPU) bottlenecks. We've seen time and time again that AMD drivers are more CPU-limited in DX11 than NV drivers, so that could be part of the discrepancy.
 
Is 4k gaming a dramatic difference from 1080p on larger screens (like, say, 55 inches)? I have no clue because i have no 4k screen to see the disparity. If it isnt really then i could save 400 dollars and pick up a 290 which will serve my needs at 1080p just fine.
 

RevenWolf

Member
Is 4k gaming a dramatic difference from 1080p on larger screens (like, say, 55 inches)? I have no clue because i have no 4k screen to see the disparity. If it isnt really then i could save 400 dollars and pick up a 290 which will serve my needs at 1080p just fine.


I'm not sure which difference you are referring to in particular so I'll try my best to answer it :p

You can see a pretty big difference between 4k gaming and 1080p in several ways, at 4k you render 4 times as much as in 1080p and thus you need a significantly stronger card, a single 290 will not cut it for 4k gaming.

If you meant running a game in 1080p on a 4k screen I wouldn't recommend that either, because the image will look horribly blurry as each pixel is essentially stretched out to 4 times its size.

If you are sticking to a 1080p monitor or screen a 290x or 980 nvidia or even 970 should be sufficient, but if you are running in 4k, that 290 alone will not be enough.
 
I'm not sure which difference you are referring to in particular so I'll try my best to answer it :p

You can see a pretty big difference between 4k gaming and 1080p in several ways, at 4k you render 4 times as much as in 1080p and thus you need a significantly stronger card, a single 290 will not cut it for 4k gaming.

If you meant running a game in 1080p on a 4k screen I wouldn't recommend that either, because the image will look horribly blurry as each pixel is essentially stretched out to 4 times its size.

If you are sticking to a 1080p monitor or screen a 290x or 980 nvidia or even 970 should be sufficient, but if you are running in 4k, that 290 alone will not be enough.
I read that 4k makes a picture look more clear and sharp but i cant fathom the magnitude of improvement from gaming at 1080p to 4k. I will probably bite the bullet and buy a 980 ti just because i hear so many people saying what an improvement it is. All im saying is that from my perspective, i cant conceptualize the improvement.
1080p looks sharp and clear enough to me, but having never seen a game run on a 4k screen i can only speculate
 

sirap

Member
If you meant running a game in 1080p on a 4k screen I wouldn't recommend that either, because the image will look horribly blurry as each pixel is essentially stretched out to 4 times its size.

If you are sticking to a 1080p monitor or screen a 290x or 980 nvidia or even 970 should be sufficient, but if you are running in 4k, that 290 alone will not be enough.

Not true if you have a good tv/monitor that doesn't mess around with bad interpolation. It looks just as crisp, you just notice jaggies a lot more.

I have a 4k dell monitor, and PS4 games look fine on them.
 

sinnergy

Member
So the pros are:

It's small and it's quiet. Seems like a biggie to me, because the PC community is always going on about DB and how loud fans are.

And it's performance wise on par (or around) with the flagship TI of Nvidia.
Sounds good to me.
 

DBT85

Member
I read that 4k makes a picture look more clear and sharp but i cant fathom the magnitude of improvement from gaming at 1080p to 4k. I will probably bite the bullet and buy a 980 ti just because i hear so many people saying what an improvement it is. All im saying is that from my perspective, i cant conceptualize the improvement.
1080p looks sharp and clear enough to me, but having never seen a game run on a 4k screen i can only speculate

My brother just bought a 55" Sony 4k tv. It's like looking at a photo and instantly noticeable for me.

Not that I'll be goig 4k any time soon. My monitor is a 30" dell 2560x1600 and won't be going anywhere any time soon.
 

Randam

Member
Is 4k gaming a dramatic difference from 1080p on larger screens (like, say, 55 inches)? I have no clue because i have no 4k screen to see the disparity. If it isnt really then i could save 400 dollars and pick up a 290 which will serve my needs at 1080p just fine.
Try down sampling.
Even then your games will look quite a bit better.


Edit: why does it look better?

Wat?
Because it are more pixels.

Same reason 1080p looks better than 720p.
 

FLAguy954

Junior Member
I'm not sure which difference you are referring to in particular so I'll try my best to answer it :p

You can see a pretty big difference between 4k gaming and 1080p in several ways, at 4k you render 4 times as much as in 1080p and thus you need a significantly stronger card, a single 290 will not cut it for 4k gaming.

If you meant running a game in 1080p on a 4k screen I wouldn't recommend that either, because the image will look horribly blurry as each pixel is essentially stretched out to 4 times its size.

If you are sticking to a 1080p monitor or screen a 290x or 980 nvidia or even 970 should be sufficient, but if you are running in 4k, that 290 alone will not be enough.

I agree with everything you said except for the bold. If you have a good UHD tv/monitor that does 1:1 pixel mapping in 1080p, then you essentially have a 1080p screen.

How much better does it look and why does it look better? Trying to wrap my head around it here

There is a huge increase in the amount of detail you can make out. For instance, my UHD Witcher 3 wallpapers look like real-life posters up close, the amount of detail is insane.
 

mboojigga

Member
I'm not sure which difference you are referring to in particular so I'll try my best to answer it :p

You can see a pretty big difference between 4k gaming and 1080p in several ways, at 4k you render 4 times as much as in 1080p and thus you need a significantly stronger card, a single 290 will not cut it for 4k gaming.

If you meant running a game in 1080p on a 4k screen I wouldn't recommend that either, because the image will look horribly blurry as each pixel is essentially stretched out to 4 times its size.

If you are sticking to a 1080p monitor or screen a 290x or 980 nvidia or even 970 should be sufficient, but if you are running in 4k, that 290 alone will not be enough.

Yeah-no not the case for my Vizio M65-C1. I play 1080@120hz on my 4k with no problems. This isn't a fact for every 4k display.
 

FLAguy954

Junior Member
Yeah-no not the case for my Vizio M65-C1. I play 1080@120hz on my 4k with no problems. This isn't a fact for every 4k display.

Same here; 1080@122 Hz with my Seiki se39uy04-01 (with custom firmware).

AMDMatt decided to share this:

Code:
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/botSx4r.png[/IMG]
 

longdi

Banned
Where he placed those 4x120 rads? I see CFX will in a pita for most people.

BTW guys, just a reminder that 980ti also comes with a free game Bats AA...a nail in the coffin if you even need to consider between the two.

I think Nvidia overestimated the potency of FuryX with the way they handled the sales of 980ti.
 

mhayze

Member
I don't understand how it can be relatively weaker at 1080p? Surely its all about fillrate and pixels? if it is strong at 4k vs 980ti, it should be similarly strong at 1080p, pushing similar numbers of pixels?

Very simply it has higher raw memory bandwidth. The Nvidia cards are (relatively) more efficient with equivalent amounts of memory bandwidth (due to runtime lossless compression) and better at mixed computational settings, and have more ROPs - i.e. the parts that actually render pixels. But when memory throughput is the limiting factor, as it often is at higher resolutions, the AMD cards will have an edge.
 
Very simply it has higher raw memory bandwidth. The Nvidia cards are (relatively) more efficient with equivalent amounts of memory bandwidth (due to runtime lossless compression) and better at mixed computational settings, and have more ROPs - i.e. the parts that actually render pixels. But when memory throughput is the limiting factor, as it often is at higher resolutions, the AMD cards will have an edge.

It's actually because AMD's driver overhead is so much worse, at lower resolutions where you become CPU bound instead of GPU bound, the AMD drivers which are not multithreaded drag the CPU down. At higher resolutions, you are GPU bound and so driver overhead becomes less of a factor.

That being said, anyone who's expecting Windows 10 and DX12 to magically increase Fury X performance by 50% and crush Nvidia is literally dreaming a delusional pipe dream. It's not happening, that's not how DX12 works.
 

TSM

Member
Good question, if I were to guess, one would be on the bottom, one out the back above the card, one out the back above the cards, and one at the front.

You can see 3 of the radiators in the pic. 1 on the bottom, 2 on the back (1 above the cards and 1 below). I'd guess the last one would be in the front. He also has a radiator on top for the processor. That is a lot a hot air being exhausted on all sides of the PC case.
 

IMACOMPUTA

Member
I read that 4k makes a picture look more clear and sharp but i cant fathom the magnitude of improvement from gaming at 1080p to 4k. I will probably bite the bullet and buy a 980 ti just because i hear so many people saying what an improvement it is. All im saying is that from my perspective, i cant conceptualize the improvement.
1080p looks sharp and clear enough to me, but having never seen a game run on a 4k screen i can only speculate

Go to bestbuy.
Have your mind blown.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
What else needs to be covered at this point? 290/290X VRMs got super hot as well to the point they limited overclocking.

They were also talking about taking a thermal camera to it to confirm or deny that. The heat pipe may or may not be running over the VRMs?
 
The more I read about this the more I think HBM's first adventure should have been a super powered APU. Like a 20 CU APU wiith 4GB of HBM. But I'm not sure how low the BOM for the HBM is.
 

tuxfool

Banned
The more I read about this the more I think HBM's first adventure should have been a super powered APU. Like a 20 CU APU wiith 4GB of HBM. But I'm not sure how low the BOM for the HBM is.

As a first gen product they would never be able to get the margins necessary to justify putting it in a budget product.
 
If you meant running a game in 1080p on a 4k screen I wouldn't recommend that either, because the image will look horribly blurry as each pixel is essentially stretched out to 4 times its size.

1080p looks perfect on 4k. other than 1080 on a 1440p display...



there is no blurriness at all at same viewing distance of an equivalent 1080display.
 

AmyS

Member
Been out of the loop for a few days as far as Radeon Fury X. Really surprised and quite disappointed that Fiji XT only has 64 ROPS, not the 128 that was widely reported (but obviously unconfirmed and wrong). So not even as many as GTX 980 Ti (96).

On another note, yeah HBM is young technology and I hope by the time of next generation consoles, SK hynix will have already introduced 3rd gen HBM (given that HBM2 will be on 2016 GPUs; Pascal and R400 series).
 

wachie

Member
Been out of the loop for a few days as far as Radeon Fury X. Really surprised and quite disappointed that Fiji XT only has 64 ROPS, not the 128 that was widely reported (but obviously unconfirmed and wrong). So not even as many as GTX 980 Ti (96).

On another note, yeah HBM is young technology and I hope by the time of next generation consoles, SK hynix will have already introduced 3rd gen HBM (given that HBM2 will be on 2016 GPUs; Pascal and R400 series).
It doesnt look like it is ROP bound though, I had the same concerns initially.
 

wachie

Member
Fury ($549) specs confirmed - 56 CUs

sapphire-radeon-r9-fupnqle.jpg
 

PFD

Member
Is the Fury X still out of stock everywhere? If they actually manage to produce tangible Nano stock , they might be on to something with this
 
That's just bizarre. The Nano has the exact same specs as the Fury X, only clocked 50MHz lower, while using 100W less power with a tiny cooler.

If it performs anywhere close to the Fury Pro or X then it will make those two cards an even worse purchase than they currently are.

Is the Fury X still out of stock everywhere? If they actually manage to produce tangible Nano stock , they might be on to something with this

Seems like it's still pretty limited but several retailers have had some in stock for awhile now.

I think if they do manage to get ~980 levels of performance out of the Nano for $499 or less, it'll be a pretty nice card regardless of the form factor. That said, AMD would then have 3 GPU's in almost the exact same performance bracket: 390X, vanilla Fury and now Nano.
 

dr_rus

Member
That's just bizarre. The Nano has the exact same specs as the Fury X, only clocked 50MHz lower, while using 100W less power with a tiny cooler.

If it performs anywhere close to the Fury Pro or X then it will make those two cards an even worse purchase than they currently are.

"Up to 1000" doesn't mean that it'll be hitting this target all the time. It should end up being a bit faster than 980 I think but slower than Fury.
 
Seems like it's still pretty limited but several retailers have had some in stock for awhile now.

I think if they do manage to get ~980 levels of performance out of the Nano for $499 or less, it'll be a pretty nice card regardless of the form factor. That said, AMD would then have 3 GPU's in almost the exact same performance bracket: 390X, vanilla Fury and now Nano.

How do you get 980 levels with $500 price tag. That's like $100-200 cheaper than the 980
 

Roronoa

Banned
Everyone's saying Nano is tomorrow yet AMD has been dead silent about the price. Why the hell do they do that? It's hard enough to get info on the specs. It's like they don't want to sell the product.
 
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