AMD Showcases R9 Fury X2 During VRLA

AMD’s Fiji architecture launched just over 7 months ago and looked set to revolutionize the GPU market due to the advent of high-speed HBM memory with a 4096-bit bus. Even though the flagship Fury X model didn’t surpass NVIDIA’s 980 Ti in most benchmarks, it showcased the possibilities of very powerful, small form-factor graphics cards. This is exemplified by the R9 Nano which recently received a fairly important price cut. During the unveiling, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, displayed a dual Fiji XT model and marketed it as the fastest GPU on the market. Clearly, it uses two cores, which helps leverage the extra performance. Unfortunately, AMD still hasn’t released the Fury X2 which seems like a major error in judgement given the development of Polaris, and NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture.

However, during VRLA, a “Prototype Tiki” gaming system was used to demo Virtual Reality tasks with a HTC Vive head mounted display. The system in question is powered by a dual-Fiji graphics card, and able to fit in a 4-inch wide chassis. This demonstrates the marvellous size to performance ratio and efficiency from AMD’s top of the range dual GPU. As a result, the Fury X2 should be released very soon, and it’s already well behind schedule. I’m not convinced the timing is right and many users might simply wait for Polaris or Pascal.

Clearly, it’s going to depend on the price point and performance. Currently, the Fury X hovers between the £500-550 mark, which already costs more than some custom cooled GTX 980 Tis. Perhaps, AMD could launch the X2 in the UK for around £799, and it might appeal to some extreme gamers, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be close to £1000.  Here we can see the system in question, but sadly, it’s a major teaser and there’s no direct photographs of the installed GPU.