Their mightiest card yet: AMD to launch R9 Fury X2 in December

We’ve been talking about the R9 Fury X2 for some time now, since June in fact.

With the potential to kick NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan X in the teeth, having just run circles around it, there’s no doubt it’s a card worth getting excited about.

Scheduled to arrive in December reports WCCF Tech, the Radeon R9 Fury X2 is set to replace the current Radeon top dog, the R9 295X2.

To achieve that, its silicon is now confirmed to be sporting two fully fledged Fiji XT chips (the GPU powering the R9 Fury X) and a TB/s of bandwidth, thanks to 8GB of HBM memory.

And if you thought that the card’s bandwidth was impressive, which of course it is, we’re willing to bet that its compute performance is going to be pretty stellar.

When you take into account just how well multiple Fiji XT GPUs scale in Crossfire X, there’s little doubt that this will unquestionably be the fastest card around.

	AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2	AMD Radeon R9 Fury X	AMD Radeon R9 Nano	AMD Radeon R9 Fury	AMD Radeon R9 290X
GPU	Fiji XT x 2	Fiji XT	Fiji XT	Fiji Pro	Hawaii XT
Stream Processors	8192	4096	4096	3584	2816
GCN Compute Units	128	64	64	56	44
Render Output Units	128	64	64	64	64
Texture Mapping Units	512	256	256	224	176
GPU Frequency	Up to 1000 Mhz	Up to 1050Mhz	Up to 1000 MHz	Up to 1000 MHz	1000Mhz
Memory	8GB HBM (4 GB Per GPU)	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	8192bit (4096 Per GPU)	4096bit	4096bit	4096bit	512bit
Memory Frequency	500Mhz	500Mhz	500 MHz	500Mhz	1250Mhz
Effective Memory Speed	1Gbps	1Gbps	1Gbps	1Gbps	5Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	1 Terabyte/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	320GB/s
Cooling	Liquid	Liquid, 120mm Radiator	Air, Single Fan/Custom AIB Solutions	Air, Custom AIB Solutions	Air, Single Blower Fan
Performance (FP32)	16.38 TFLOPS	8.6 TFLOPS	8.19 TFLOPS	7.2 TFLOPS	5.6 TFLOPS
TDP	~375W	275W	175W	275W	250W
GFLOPS/Watt	~43.7	31.3	47.1	26.2	19.3
Launch Price	TBA	R12, 000 +	R12, 000 +	R9, 000 +	R7, 000 +
Launch Date	December 2015	24th June 2015	7th September 2015	10th July 2015	24th October 2013

*Table courtesy of WCCF Tech. Prices have been adjusted for local markets.

Fast as the R9 Fury X2, or whatever it’s eventually called, will be, we would only recommend it for 4K resolution or the most stalwart of AMD fans.

The very same multi-GPU scaling analysis we mentioned above, demonstrating the fantastic scalability of the Fiji XT GPU, also shows that for anything but 4K resolution, two GTX 980 Ti’s will almost assuredly beat out the R9 Fury X2.

And if the current price of the R9 Fury X is anything to go by, two cards may very well be cheaper too.

At the end of the day, however, this latest card from AMD is going to be a thing of beauty, especially with their all-new software suite, Crimson Edition, at the helm.

Now all we need is for that rumour of a secret dual-GPU in the works over at NVIDIA to be true and we’ve got ourselves a worthwhile showdown.