AMD launches Fury Gaming GPU. Beats 980 & now 980 Ti SLI!

After a very tough last couple of weeks looks like AMD finally caught a break. AMD today launched the regular version of the Fury (the non X version) and it's gotten positive reviews from reviewers and gamers alike. According to Anandtech the Fury is "offers between 8% and 17% better performance than the GTX 980”. AMD actually did a better job with the cooling this time around as it's not only faster than the 980 but it's runs cooler during gaming.

What surprised me more is that with AMD's driver updates the 390X actually has "caught up" with the 980 despite it being $70 cheaper. For example, the 390X (with it's twice the memory as the GTX 980) get's the same frames as the GTX 980 in GTA 5.

Heck even the 8GB 290X get's withing 3 frames of the GTX 980 and it's $130 cheaper (also twice the memory as the GTX 980). That's some driver magic! Hopefully the Fury/X will also get better in performance as the driver's improve. This definitely a Win-Win situation for AMD. The Fury or even the 390X is definitely a better buy than the 980.

Full Review:

Anandtech

tom's hardware

Guru3d (Guru3d game the Fury it's Recommend award)

Very nice, you go AMD.

Nice results but this line of cards is still not a large enough gap for me to move away from the 290X's, maybe next cycle.

@Xtasy26:

My tax return funded R9-290X is already OC. Notice the decline for 1 gen old ex-flagship 780 Ti flagship product.

My "980 Ti" was paid by my company.

Are you still sticking with Radeon HD 69x0?

@ronvalencia The OC R9 290X can reach the 390X level. I wonder how long AMD will have them in stock, b\c it's an awesome deal to get the performance and within a hair distance of the 980.

That's an excellent point. People don't notice that, 780 Ti was actually faster than the R9 290X when it came out, now it got it beat. It seemed like nVidia threw the 780 Ti owners under the bus. So, you would have been better off getting the R9 290X instead of the 780 Ti. I am guessing Fury's performance will only get better as time goes on.

And yes I still have my HD 6970 oc'ed. I am thinking of getting one of these or wait till the AMD Fury Nano. The thing is in order to get the best out of these GPUs, I would need to do a full system over haul. My OC'ed Phenom II Black Edition is getting old, I am just waiting for Zen. Which brings me to the point, how long does it take to design a CPU from the ground up? I mean they, AMD, got back the legendary AMD CPU designer Jim Keller back from Apple in 2012. If I am honest they should have came up with Zen this year. Why? When intel was trying to squeeze every last juice out of the P4 back in 04 - 06. intel was quietly working on Core 2 Duo during that time and released the Core 2 in 2006. That's only 2 - 3 years. If Zen comes out in 2016 that would mean they would worked on Zen for 4 years. That's way too long IMO. At least the new CEO was smart enough to pull resources away from AMD's other projects and fully focus on Zen. Something the last CEO should have done long time ago.

lol amd... Wake me up when they will have some great features such as PhysX and actually good drivers... zzzzzz

But Nvidia.

Yeah you mean those features people never use because huge perfomance hits?

I have no problem with PhysX and if the hermits on these boards are anything to go by every PC gamer has a mega computer and doesn't worry about silly things like "performance hits".

It's been like this for the last few years, and AMD has been consistently losing.

Nvidia releases a line, and it stays at the top for good for many months to over a year. AMD releases a new line that just beats the nvidia line, but then nvidia releases their new line shortly after and takes back the spot for yet another lengthy cycle. High price/performance is the only thing AMD has going for it. If money is not a significant issue, nvidia would trump in all other aspects most of the time (other than right after AMD releases a new line).

AMD has been in second place for a long long time, ever since nvidia dealt with that Fermi mishap.

Interesting, however with my next PC build I will go for an Nvidia GPU...

AMD cards look pretty good, esp the 390X which is nicely priced. But the power draw is huge, like 50% more than the competing nvidia products. Honestly that is the only thing preventing me from buying one immediately. Not sure how nvidia gets so much bang with much less power.

Thinking about upgrading. I feel like I should just wait for a price drop and get the 980ti

Nice card

If you factor overclocking which is almost non-existent on the Fury/X, they both get trounced by their direct competiton.

It's sad that what they class a low powered card from AMD is now is 175W.

@Xtasy26: Lol, kind of discouraging to see my GPU, 960 GTX, all the way at the bottom of the FPS in 4K chart there..

AMD doesn't know how to make small low energy beastly cards like the 980

look at how big an ugly that card looks compared to the 980

they run much more cooler, quieter, with less power,

for the same price, you could get a nvidia card overclock it to beat amd and still be cooler and quieter

not to mention shadowplay

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/848720/first-tdr-crash-in-witcher-3-on-reference-980-ti-unstable-card-/?offset=2

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/856478/geforce-900-series/killing-floor-2-pc-freezing-with-gtx-980-/

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2668436/google-chrome-crashes-sli-gtx-980-driver-stopped-responding.html

http://www.22hundred.net/2008/03/nvidia-causing-majority-of-vista.html

try again.

For Shadow Play, AMD has GVR.

AMD driver has better post-process options for videos playback.

Overclocking 980 will increase the power consumption.

You must be stuck in 1999. AMD has been making descent drivers since the 9700 Pro on on-wards. I have 3 AMD GPUs including one in my 17" Gaming Laptop that doesn't have any driver issues. Speaking of Gaming Laptops maybe you should lookup "bumpgate nvidia" and see what nVidia did to their Gaming Laptop GPUs for which I got screwed on my last 17" Gaming Laptop that had nVidia in it. I lost a boatloads of money and my entire 17" Gaming Laptop thanks to nVidia. AMD's GPUs issues are a JOKE to what nVidia did to their customers that brought Gaming Laptops that had nVidia chip inside them couple of years ago.

Thanks for mentioning that. I really don't know much about what gpu features AMD offer these days, compared Nvidia.

Very nice, this may be my next card.

.. Why? The 960, 970 and 980 were never meant to be able to play the majority of games out there in 4k.. Hell over 99% don't even play at 4k to begin with.. And that is at 1440p, the 960 is a midrange card meant for 1080p or lower.. Even then I wouldn't play the majority of those higher cards at those settings and resolution specifically because I prefer to at least see fps in the 60s to 90s.. That is the great thing about pc gaming, developers don't have you by the balls in telling you what settings and fps is best for you.. You get choice..

inb4 amd and nvidia fanboys play "i've got the biggest wang tennis"

My card is longer than yours :).

Damn that looks like some good performance. I'm on a 670 for my desktop, the 390x is tempting but I think I'll wait it out a little longer.

Good job AMD, nice to see old cards still get a performance boost. Wish my 670m (turd) got that kind of boost.

I was watching Jayztwocents on this review and I got to say that this is okay but nothing to brag about but if your looking for something for a fair price, this is it.

I will likely wait fo rnext year's lineup before I upgrade my 680, just to see the massive jump in performance. Also... then i can game at 4k 60fps fully instead of crappy old 1080p wasting pixels on my TV.

I have no huge performance hits with Nvidia features. However, even AMD users can use Nvidia features. It was like TressFX when it released.. but that was kind of a joke.

This is good, though. A price war is going on, and it could possibly lower the price of all cards.

Fury performance is the very close ie virtually the same with vanilla GTX 980 at 1080p, its slightly more expensive and uses more power but has little overclocking potential. Now at 1440p on average Fury is 10% faster than 980. at 4K its around 15% faster on average. So the Fury is a much better option then the FuryX and its a more direct competitor against the 980. Now with that GTA 5 benchmark posted does not follow other review sites showing 50-60ish frame rate at 1440p with no AA. Now if were to add the overclocking ability to the GTX 980 then 980 still can match and edge out the Fury. So AMD did good with the this version of Fury

See here is the thing, the fury and fury x would have been great to amazing cards if they were not absolute crap when it comes to overclock.. The Fury X begged for a overclock.. A card with water cooling that is super small and showing temperatures of low 50's max? That is upwards to a 20+ overhead in temperature of overclocking room.. Honestly I hope this new water cooler closed loop takes hold for NVidia.. It is not only way superior to the typical air coolers, but it is a exhaust.. This is what bothers me with these superior custom coolers on these cards, not a single one is a blower.. They dump heat back into the system..

If you are gaming at 1080P might as well get the R9 390X. Get's close to the 980 and sometimes ties it for $70 dollar less. Having said that if you want "future proof" I would recommend the Fury over the 390X/980, especially given AMD's history of optimizing their GPUs via drivers further down the line (i.e. the 390X aka OC'ed 8GB 290x, now getting 980 performance levels, whereas when the 980 launched in September of last year the 290X was behind in performance level but now it has closed the gap and is now matching it in many cases).

He was comparing a heavily overclocked GTX 980 to the Fury and not the regular GTX 980. That's just stupid. Even then the Fury was beating it in games like GTA V. To be fair, he did OC the Fury which then easily trumped the OC'ed 980 by a significant margin. I wouldn't use OC results as be all end all argument when buying a graphics card as the ability to overclock GPUs may vary from GPU to GPU.

Also, his demonstration of coil-whine was fail as I could hear no coil whine what so ever. Heck I could hear the characters in GTA V but no coil whine, which goes to show it's not an issue.

It's not the length, it's the bandwidth ;)

So much POWER!!!!... to play indie games :P

Do you know anyone who has this card and plays indie games?

Nice cards, good bench results and good reviews, it's a pity the OC potential with them is limited.

Still can't get myself to buy an AMD card.

May I ask why? Was a rabid nVidia fan boy for 10 years and switched to AMD with the HD 4870 back in 2008. Their price/performance ratio absolutely kills nVidia especially if you are looking for something like the 390X and even the 390 which has 2X the memory over the GTX 970 for around the same price.

Are you on AMD's payroll, TS?

http://www.nvidia.com/page/legacy.html

GeForce 700 Series are part of legacy products.

NCP still has certain freezing issues since my last NVIDIA CUDA GPU i.e. GeForce 9650M GT.

Unlike https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/842159/geforce-drivers/anyone-crashing-freezing-with-gtx-980-ti-with-353-06-drivers-/ My 980 Ti factory OC is stable for the most part i.e. a few crash to desktop or TRDs.

I'm aware of workarounds such as https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/841036/geforce-drivers/display-driver-is-not-responding-and-has-recovered/post/4572977/#4572977

The workarounds involves setting Maxwellv2 back to reference clock speeds.

For now, I'll maintain a "second sourced" GPU setup.

For 15 watts real mobility PC gaming without a wall power socket, AMD FX-8800p APU wins this segment.

amd is just a smarter choice enjoy your 3.5bs ram nvidia

i gave up on amd after my 5870. I wish AMD would stop trying to chase nvidia and get a lead on these scumbags. Having a card come out 6+ months after nvidia and barely matching it will never work. They need to be releasing a card at the same time as nvidia with the same or better performance and not so many months later when everyones already bought the nvidia card.

My 560Ti just took another step towards a firey life in eternal hell.

It's also a huge card with a huge power draw.

AMD has definitely improved their GPU line in recent years and offer a nice price/performance value in relation to Nvidia.

But Nvidia's cards still run cooler and quieter with way less power draw while usually coming in a smaller, sleeker package. It's simply more efficient.

@frank_castle: nope the fury runs cooler