AMD R9 Fury X2 Cards Officially Delayed Until 2016
When AMD announced its Radeon Fury series of graphics cards this past summer, the company talked about its dual-GPU R9 Fury X2 in such a way that it seemed like we'd see it in the fall, or at least before the end of the year. As we can now see, the release is still pending, despite 2016 being right around the corner.
According to a new report, AMD has decided to hold off on the release of this card until the new year, so as to better align itself with the explosion that will be virtual reality. Based on this wording, it looks like AMD could release it now if it wanted to, but is deliberately holding off simply to make more of an impact in a few months.
This is an interesting, but straight-forward, strategy. It's also one that AMD's biggest competitor doesn't seem to see the point in. When NVIDIA released its GeForce TITAN X this past March, a huge focus of the card was with what it could do for VR. That was eight months ago, and by the time AMD gets its Fury X2 out the door, the gap could become an entire year.
It's hard to blame AMD for this move, though, because based on what we see from Fury X or even Fury, Fury X2 could prove to be a serious powerhouse, and an ideal matchup for VR at the high-end. While high framerates are ideal with regular desktop or notebook gaming, they're imperative with VR. No one is going to want to play games in VR very long if each session makes them want to throw-up - unless of course it's Vomit Simulator 2016 VR Edition they're playing.
One thing's for sure: it's going to be great to see the Fury X2 finally launch. With TITAN X having been released almost a year ago, we wouldn't be surprised to see another release from NVIDIA go down at the same time. Dual-GPU GTX 990 with 12GB of memory, perhaps?
