AMD demonstrates its Fiji GPU, but not Radeon Fury X: NVIDIA must’ve scared them

During the Computex trade-show, AMD was only too happy to demonstrate its upcoming flagship GPU, Fiji, but not the card it will be bolted to.

NVIDIA’s latest endeavour into kicking AMD’s butt is the GTX 980 Ti, and it’s a fantastic piece of kit. It eats 4K gaming for breakfast and doesn’t cost anything like the GTX Titan X, a potent formula.

We wonder if the GTX 980 Ti was enough to deter AMD from demonstrating their high-end flagship card because what AMD’s chief executive, Lisa Su, demonstrated on stage was their Fiji GPU, but not the Radeon Fury Card it’s supposed to power.

AMD’s Fiji Pro GPU, as held by chief executive of AMD, Lisa Su.

If AMD’s naming convention seems a little convoluted to you, that’s because it is – AMD really isn’t in the business of making their naming and numbering scheme understandable.

According to WCCF Tech, rumours suggest that in spite of the Fiji’s raw compute performance as well their rhapsody on the use of high bandwidth memory in the Fiji and all of the benefits contained there within, AMD’s Radeon Fury X, powered by the Fiji XT GPU, may not be able to match NVIDIA’s Titan X, possibly even their GTX 980 Ti.

It’s down to “peculiarities around the immature nature of the drivers for the yet unreleased Fiji GPU and the fact that AMD is still tweaking the BIOS settings for the Radeon Fury based cards which are based on it.” So say a few internal sources.

In accordance with NVIDIA’s latest card, AMD may very well be tweaking the clock speeds of their cards for optimal performance.

Unofficial AMD Radeon Fury Snapshot

For the moment, many have predicted that even with just 4GB of VRAM, the Radeon Fury X will outperform the GTX Titan X, and almost certainly its spin-off, the GTX 980 Ti.

After all, it sports 4096 GPU Cores (more commonly referred to as Shaders), 512 GB/s of memory bandwidth and approximately 8.5 TFLOPS of compute performance. Compared to the Titan X’s meagre 336 GB/s of memory bandwidth and a dismal (sarcasm for those who can’t read the room) 7 TFLOPS of compute performance.

The thing is, real world inefficiencies, video game development tendencies and coding variations in no way translates into direct 1:1 performance figures. The GTX Titan X is still in the running until we see the actual Radeon Fury X’s performance.

And what about the smaller Fiji Pro GPU? How will the Radeon Fury compete? We can’t wait to find out, and how will it price locally. The GTX 980 Ti is hardly a cheap card in SA after all.