AMD R9 Fury X CrossfireX 12K Eyefinity Review

Final Thoughts

Summary

Well, what a ride, crossfire in general is very hard to setup correctly regardless of the screen resolution. Be it that drivers aren’t properly optimised or the games themselves aren’t programmed to work with more than one GPU; either way the results aren’t very favourable in general. During the original R9 Fury X crossfire review, we saw extreme performance along with near perfect scaling; so AMD has addressed the issues and rectified them, in the programs we test with anyway.

The performance that we saw today was what crossfire was made for, pushing the boundaries of performance at ultra high resolutions. Okay, we may have only tested at medium settings, but only 3-4 high-end card setups could handle that type of performance requirement that is required for the resolution that we are using. In most of our tests we saw over 90% scaling and performance was very near the golden 60FPS on average, which is extremely good not only at this resolution but for AMD in general considering the rocky past with crossfire compatibility.

Performance then seemed to drop off in the newer and more demanding games such as GTA, where such detail is put into the environment around the player as well as what the player can see. One of the worst parts of testing today was the Unigine Valley test, the application hasn’t been fully optimised for 12K resolutions and when faced with two brand new cards it failed; code probably hasn’t been entered to recognised them.

So what about the fairly heated subject of 4GB HBM VRAM? At 4K, the R9 Fury X was a competitive match for the larger capacity GTX 980Ti and Titan X and even at this high resolution; it can still put up a good fight. However, when the VRAM limit is reached, you start seeing FPS drops, which are becoming more evident in the more demanding modern games. Even though this is the case, don’t let it put you off. Two R9 Fury X graphics cards will cost around £1000, then three additional 4K monitors will be around the same price; so in total you are looking for at least £2000 for the most basic 4K monitor and dual Fury X setup. Is it worth it? Of course it is, it’s crazy and fun, but for now, 4K is better suited to dual Fury X, perhaps we’ll get more Fury X cards and try 12K again, at higher settings, once drivers have matured a little.

Pros

• AMD offer ample performance through the Fiji XT GPU, some instances over 60FPS
• Crossfire drivers are now working well
• HBM technology is at the forefront of innovation

Cons

• 4GB VRAM is starting to limit the cards
• Two Fury X graphics cards are power hungry
• 4K is still relatively expensive

“The triple monitor setup really starts to put a strain on the HBM touting graphics cards, but they still manage to pull through and offer amazing performance.”

Thank you to all of the manufacturers for providing these review samples.