From a technology perspective this is the very first HBM card, and consequently the missteps AMD makes and the lessons they learn here will be important for future generation of cards. Real world expectations are 30-40% over R9 290X, depending on the game and the resolution, with R9 Fury X extending its gains at higher resolutions.įor AMD, the Radeon R9 Fury X is a critically important card for a number of reasons. Meanwhile for ROP-bound scenarios the difference can be anywhere between 5% and 120%, depending on how bandwidth-bound the task is and how effective delta compression is in shrinking the bandwidth requirements. For pure compute workloads, between the 45% increase in SPs and 5% clockspeed increase, R9 Fury X will be up to 53% faster than the R9 290X. Relative to R9 290X, this represents a 60% increase in memory bandwidth, a true generational jump that we will not see again in an AMD GPU for some number of years to come.Ĭonsequently the performance expectations for R9 Fury X will significantly vary with the nature of the rendering workload. Featuring an ultra-wide 4096-bit memory bus clocked at 1Gbps (500MHz DDR), the R9 Fury X has a whopping 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, fed by 4GB of HBM organized in 4 stacks of 1GB each. Meanwhile the other significant influence here is the extensive memory bandwidth enabled by using High Bandwidth Memory, which combined with a larger 2MB L2 cache should leave the ROPs far better fed on R9 Fury X than it did on AMD’s Hawaii cards.Īs for High Bandwidth Memory, the next-generation memory technology gives AMD more memory bandwidth than ever before. That said, what the raw specifications do not cover are the architectural optimizations we have covered in past pages, which should see Fiji’s ROPs and geometry engines both perform better per unit and per clock than Hawaii’s. Like Hawaii, R9 Fury X features 4 geometry engines on the front-end and 64 ROPs on the back-end, so from a theoretical standpoint Fiji does not have any additional resources to work with on those portions of the rendering pipeline. Getting away from the CUs for a second, the R9 Fury X features less dramatic changes at its front-end and back-end relative to Hawaii. Meanwhile as a result of scaling up the number of CUs, the number of texture units has also scaled up to 256 texture units, a new high-water mark for the number of texture units in a single GPU from any vendor. Hawaii by comparison topped out at 2816 SPs (44 CUs), giving R9 Fury X a 1280 SP (~45%) advantage in raw shading hardware. With a maximum boost clockspeed of 1050MHz and with 4096 SPs organized into 64 CUs, R9 Fury X has been designed to deliver more shading/compute performance than ever before. Fiji is clocked high, cooled with overkill, and priced to go right up against the only GM200 GeForce card from NVIDIA that anyone cares about: the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Featuring a fully enabled Fiji GPU, the R9 Fury X is Fiji at its finest, and a safe bet to be the grandest video card AMD releases built on TSMC’s 28nm process. Having launched last week and being reviewed today is AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X, the company’s new flagship single-GPU video card. Now that we’ve had a chance to cover all of the architectural and design aspirations of the Fiji GPU and its constituting cards, let’s get down to the business end of this article: the product we’ll be reviewing today.
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