Review: AMD Radeon R9 Fury X

Conclusion

AMD and Nvidia have taken contrasting approaches for designing premium graphics cards in mid-2015. Hampered by the problems associated with 20nm manufacturing, which was supposed to be prevalent by now, both companies have had to rework architectures for them to be economically feasible on the longstanding 28nm process.

AMD's design choices for the Radeon R9 Fury X put shading and memory bandwidth at the top of the list. On-paper specs blow every other GPU out of the water, as is usually the case, and the tiny form factors available through the use of innovative HBM memory are intriguing and interesting in equal measure - no longer do powerhouse graphics cards need to be big, bulky, loud and unnecessarily thirsty.

The Fury X is, quite easily, the best GPU to come out of AMD. A 40 per cent performance improvement over R9 290X is nothing to sniff at but that, really, is not the real competition. Nvidia's pre-emptive launch of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti uses a more efficient core and regular GDDR5 memory to achieve benchmark performances that are, in our opinion, a little better than the latest Radeon's, perhaps helped in small part by having a larger framebuffer. Partner GTX 980 Ti's are faster still and overclock better than Fury X.

We're heartened to see that Fury X propels AMD back into the high-end consumer GPU race; it can go into some tiny systems that GTX 980 Ti cannot. Real innovation on the memory front and solid performance in games brings it very close to Nvidia's finest right now. Ultimately the premium PC gaming space is now defined by whose ecosystem you prefer - AMD or Nvidia's? FreeSync vs. G-Sync or Catalyst vs. GeForce.

Making a decision between the two heavyweight cards is no easy task, though if it were our money on the table and we had to make a decision, a well-implemented partner GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB would get the nod. Whatever you end up choosing, competition can only be seen as good for the consumer... AMD does manage to provide that with the Fury X.

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X

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The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card will be available to purchase from Scan Computers.

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