AMD Radeon R9 Fury X review - Introduction

The Radeon R9 Fury X analyzed
AMD unleashes Fury

We review the Radeon R9 Fury X, one of the most discussed and anticipated products of the year. A product that is big in performance, it is fitted with that all new HBM memory and is based on a small form factor. This initial Fury X model is already liquid cooled for you. So yes, it has been a wild ride over the past few weeks alright. Most of the rumors in terms of specifications were right, the performance benchmarks you have seen leaked, all fake. Over at E3 2015 AMD announced the new Fury series of products, an enthusiast class graphics cards series with the flagship product being called the Radeon R9 Fury X, and it is quite the beast based on what you guys know as the Fiji XT GPU. There will be more iterations of this Fiji GPU based product though. The X is the liquid cooled version, the 'regular' Radeon R9 Fury (without the X) will be based on Fiji Pro, an air-cooled solution that we will see later this summer. But two more products will be released; the Nano, which will be a small form factor product to house in a tiny PC that sits, say, in your living room and then there is Project Quantum, based on two Fiji GPUs seated on one PCB (dual-GPU). Crazy stuff, so yes, in the months to come we'll have lots to talk about and discuss.

Anyway, today the last segment of the embargo has been lifted, we can finally talk about the Radeon R9 Fury X in the way we like to, in-depth with performance benchmarks. Radeon R9 Fury X uses the Fiji XT GPU, and it is literally a beast as it is still based on a 28nm fabrication node, that means a chip just over the size of 5 x 5cm. There's lots of good stuff going on inside that chip as, the memory you guys all know as GDDR5 typically has been seated on the graphics card PCB. Well, with the Radeon R9 Fury X that has changed. AMD has made a bold move to HBM memory (we'll talk about it over the next pages), the 4 GB of memory now is seated onto the actual GPU (chip). So, try to comprehend this, the Fiji Xt GPU has 8.9 Billion transistors, and that is EXCLUDING the HBM memory chips, I know..! crazy figures right? To be able to fit all that on 28nm, well it's impressive to say the least. The GPU itself (and we'll talk in detail about it on the following pages) is based on GCN 1.2 architecture and then scaled upwards, this puppy now has 4096 shader processors. 

Such a big chip requires volts, and thus will create heat, AMD however made a very smart move; for the Radeon R9 Fury X they are including an all-in-one liquid cooling solution. It's connected and powered through the graphics card, so no extra wires will be present. Everything about the Radeon R9 Fury X screams multitudes of 4096, 4K Ultra HD gaming ready, 4096 shader processors, 4096 MB of graphics memory and a 4096-bit wide bus (yes, that is not a typo). The end result is a product with 8.6 TFLOPS of compute performance offering excellent game performance in the more difficult and complex to render situations like Ultra HD gaming. 

Have a peek at the card and its AIO liquid cooler, it's cute to see and follows a small form factor design. This is the first ever 4GB HBM product in the world, have a peek at the product we test today and then head onwards into the review.