AMD Fury X: What We Know so Far

Sadly, due to problematic stock levels in the EU; we weren’t able to get ourselves one of the new Fiji based graphics cards. However, that isn’t going to stop us commenting on the card.

When the card was first announced, people on both AMD and NVIDIA benches sat forward, somewhat worried about what High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) could bring to the graphics market. It is a new technology, so the results could have gone either way. It promised lower power consumption, a smaller footprint, and massive bandwidth gains compared to traditional GDDR5 memory.

As time progressed, we had snippets of information released to us in the forms of charts and pictures. In one hand, the Fury range stacked up to offer outstanding performance, in the other, the results leaked looked too good to be true.

The renders that were coming in looked amazing, a short card with a AIO water cooling set up, it ticked all of the right boxes and thankfully, AMD delivered what we all wanted.

So what about actual performance? Earlier today we caught a leaked review showing that the performance was somewhere on par with the NVIDIA GTX Titan X. Now that more reviews are available, it seems that it is more on par with the NVIDIA GTX 980Ti, although the performance difference between those two cards is marginal.

Let’s take a look at what some of our friends around the world thought of the new card.

HardOCP released one of the first on time reviews and this quote really struck a cord with us here at eTeknix:

“The new AMD Fiji GPU and Fury X video card looks awesome on paper, but has underwhelmed and disappointed us when it comes to real world gameplay. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X feels like a proof of concept for HBM technology.”

Sadly, you can provide the numbers, but if the actual performance isn’t there; it won’t work out. AMD have a tendency to provide huge numbers such as utilising a 512bit interface on the R9 290 and 290x graphics cards and still plummeting compared to what NVIDIA had to offer.

The editor at Toms Hardware wrote:

“There, sitting alongside Nvidia’s gaming champion, Radeon R9 Fury X now shares the throne. It’s not faster, it’s not cheaper and it’s certainly not any more elegant. The card is just enough to yield a bit of parity. And for the AMD faithful, that’s enough to warrant a purchase. We have to wonder if the company stopped just short of the gold, though. More speed, a lower price, some sort of game bundle—it could have gone in several directions, really, to convince enthusiasts that Fury X is the better buy.”

From reading many reviews, we know that it is not quite the Titan X killer that AMD set out to produce, it tumbles with the GTX 980Ti. However, for AMD to release a card with matching performance around the same time as NVIDIA, this be a step to a more competitive future.

Despite the overall loss against the Titan X, some review sites are still awarding the Fury X the highest possible award; do you think this is a fair representation or could another award be used in its place? Here at eTeknix, if we had the card in our hands and based off of what we’ve seen we think that the AMD Fury X would deserve an Innovation award thanks to the incorporation of High-Bandwidth Memory, but that’s about it. Check out our awards here and comment what you think would best suit.