06-24-2015, 09:30 PM
http://www.maximumpc.com/amd-radeon-fury-x-review/
Quote: There were times leading up to this heavyweight championship bout that we really thought Fury X would pull off the win. And to their credit, niggles with drivers and hardware sampling notwithstanding, Fury X gives a decent showing. But those hoping to see the “underdog” AMD pull off an upset and surpass the Titan X, never mind the identically priced GTX 980 Ti, are going to have to wait and see how things develop going forward.
We can’t help but feel that there’s plenty of room left to improve Fury X performance with driver updates. It has 33 percent more memory bandwidth than the already well-fed 390X, and shader computational performance should be up to 45 percent faster than the 390X. We’re also not looking at situations where we’re CPU limited or VRAM capacity limited, so why then does the Fury X only average 18.5 percent faster than 390X across all of our tests? Like we said: drivers.
The Fiji architecture is the first new high performance architecture for AMD since fall of 2013. (We don't count Tonga, as it was effectively a lateral move from Tahiti.) AMD has had plenty of time to improve their drivers on the Hawaii architecture, but Fiji changes the playing field. Not only does it sport a third more shaders, but it also has a different memory subsystem to contend with. 512GB/s of bandwidth is all well and good, but if latencies and other elements have changed compared to GDDR5—and they almost certainly have—previous “best practice” driver code from AMD may no longer be properly tuned.
It wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened to AMD, either; AMD discovered more than a year after the launch of Tahiti that they had missed out on a lot of potential performance. Their “frame pacing” driver optimizations helped to improve both the smoothness of the gaming experience as well as performance in general, but even after determining there was work to be done it was nearly a year before the second “frame pacing driver” was released to the public. Hopefully AMD can improve Fiji performance much more quickly, and if so they may actually come out on top—provided you don’t need more than 4GB VRAM.
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It takes grit to enter the ring against the reigning heavyweight champion, and Fury X managed to land a few solid punches in the early going. As the match progressed, however, 980 Ti proved to have more stamina and legs. This one didn’t come down to a split decision, and there was little in the way of referee controversy; Fury X just wasn’t quite ready for the belt. It’s a product with plenty of guts, but it also has some bad habits picked up in the amateur ranks. With additional training in the form of drivers, Fury X could come back as a force to be reckoned with. The question is whether that will be in a few weeks, months, or possibly it will take so long that 980 Ti and Titan X will be replaced by even more formidable hardware. We’ll be in line for tickets as soon as a rematch is announced, though we still have reservations about Fury’s 4GB glass chin.