At E3 2015’s PC Gaming Press Conference, having talked up their “Fiji” GPUs as well as their use of the much vaunted high-bandwidth memory (HBM), AMD has finally unveiled their Radeon Fury graphics cards, and then some.
And to everyone’s surprise, there’s one more Radeon Fury variant than expected.
Before we get to the elephant in the room, the Radeon R9 Fury X2, let’s quickly break down the current R9 Fury range as it stands.
The R9 Fury X is AMD’s water-cooled card, and the R9 Fury is alternative air-cooled card, both of which have 4GB of HBM memory and will sell for $649 and $549 respectively.
At those prices, the R9 Fury X is set to compete with NVIDIA’s GTX 980 Ti, so expect it to cost at least R11, 000 if the GTX 980 Ti’s local pricing is anything to go by – and the R9 Fury will, of course, go head-to-head with the GTX 980.
As a result of the air-cooling, the Fury uses a cut-down Fiji GPU, but expect it to still perform very well.
On the other hand, the R9 Nano is a much smaller, mini-ITX-like Fury card, made possible thanks to HBM memory. The PCB size is significantly smaller than the other R9 Fury cards, requires a single fan and is around the size of an R7 260.
Don’t expect the R9 Nano to use a full Fiji GPU. To attain that form factor, it is very likely the slowest of the Radeon R9 Fury series – nevertheless, its size means a number of applications the other Fury cards couldn’t manage
Talk about tiny.
And now for the behemoth, AMD’s highest performing flagship Fury card, the R9 Fury X2.
Expected to release a number of months from now, the R9 Fury X2 is a dual-chip R9 Fury X card – that means 8192 stream processors and 8GB of high-bandwidth memory. That’s a lot.
Radeon R9 Fury X2. Image courtesy of Anshel Sag.
Expect the R9 Fury X2 to consume up to 375W of power, but there’s no word on whether that means if it’ll be air or water-cooled.
| Radeon R9 Fury X2 | Radeon R9 Fury X (Water Cooled) | Radeon R9 Nano (Air Cooled) | Radeon R9 Fury (Air Cooled) | Radeon R9 290X | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | Fiji XT x 2 | Fiji XT | Fiji Pro? | Fiji Pro | Hawaii XT |
| Stream Processors | 8192 | 4096 | TBA | 3584 | 2816 |
| GCN Compute Units | 128 | 64 | TBA | 56 | 44 |
| Render Output Units | 128 | 64 | TBA | 64 | 64 |
| Texture Mapping Units | 512 | 256 | TBA | 224 | 176 |
| GPU Frequency | TBA | ≥ 1050Mhz | TBA | 1000Mhz | 1000Mhz |
| Memory | 8GB HBM (4 GB Per Chip) | 4GB HBM | 4GB HBM | 4GB HBM | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 4096-bit x 2 | 4096bit | 4096bit | 4096bit | 512bit |
| Memory Frequency | 500Mhz | 500Mhz | 500Mhz | 500Mhz | 1250Mhz |
| Effective Memory Speed | 1Gbps | 1Gbps | 1Gbps | 1Gbps | 5Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1024 GB/s | 512GB/s | 512GB/s | 512GB/s | 320GB/s |
| Cooling | Liquid | Liquid, 120mm Radiator | Air, Single Fan | Air, 3 Axial Fans | Air, Single Blower Fan |
| Performance (SPFP) | 17 TFLOPS | ≥ 8.6 TFLOPS | TBA | 7.2 TFLOPS | 5.6 TFLOPS |
| TDP | TBC | 275W | 175W | 275W | 290W |
| Power Connectors | Dual 8-Pin | Dual 8-Pin | 8-Pin | 6+8 Pin? | 6+8 Pin |
| GFLOPS/Watt | ~ | ≥ 28.7 | TBA | 26.2 | 19.4 |
| Launch Price | 1499 US? | $649 | $449-$499 | $549 | $549 |
| Launch Date | Autumn 2015 | 24th June 2015 | Summer 2015 | 14th July 2015 | 24th October 2013 |
They’re all beastly cards, and HBM means 4K resolution gaming woes will be a thing of the past.
It’s little surprise when the first generation of HBM memory promises 4.5x the bandwidth of the next best thing, GDDR5, and an absurd 16X the bandwidth of DDR3.
VRAM Comparison Table
And 8.6 teraflops of performance, or a staggering 17 teraflops for the R9 Fury X2, is no joke.
Just to put that into perspective, the mighty GTX Titan X only manages 7 teraflops of compute performance.
More AMD Radeon news
AMD officially unveils its R9 300 and R7 300 GPUs at E3 2015
AMD’s Quantum: An Ultra-small PC with unbelievable performance
Radeon Fury X benchmarked: AMD’s R300 series roadmap leaked
