AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Fiji And HBM Put To The Test

3DMark Fire Strike has two benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, while Extreme mode targets 2560x1440. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Extreme mode is explicitly designed for CrossFire / SLI systems. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. And 80 million pixels are processed per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations. Tessellation volume is reduced to 2.6 million vertices and the number of pixels processed per frame rises to 170 million.

3DMark Fire Strike

The Radeon R9 Fury X put up some good scores in 3DMark Fire Strike, that pulled ahead of the Titan X and our original 980 Ti numbers. But just in time for this launch, a factory overclocked GeForce GTX 980 Ti from EVGA arrived, as did a fresh set of drivers from NVIDIA.  The combination of higher clocks and NVIDIA's new drivers boosted the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti's score into the stratosphere and it finished just behind the dual GPU- powered 295 X2. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we haven't been able to go back and re-test the Titan X and reference 980 Ti with the new drivers just yet to see where they land, but we expect some uplift, for sure.