The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top

Civilization: Beyond Earth

Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.

Unlike Battlefield 4 where we needed to switch back to DirectX for performance reasons on the R9 Fury X, AMD’s latest card still holds up rather well on Mantle here, probably due to the fact that Civilization is a newer game. Though not drawn in this chart, what we find is that AMD loses a frame or two per second for running Mantle, but in return they see far, far better minimums (more on that later).

Overall then the R9 Fury X looks pretty good at 4K. Even at Ultra quality it can deliver a better than 60fps average and is within 2% of the GTX 980 Ti. On the other hand AMD struggles a bit more at 1440p, where the absolute framerate is still rather high, but relative to the GTX 980 Ti it’s now an 11% performance gap. This being a Mantle game, the fact that AMD does fall behind is a bit surprising, as at a high level they should be enjoying the CPU benefits of the low-level API. We’ll revisit 1440p performance a bit later on, but this is going to be a recurring quirk for AMD, and a detriment for 1440p 144Hz monitor owners.

The bigger advantage of Mantle is really the minimum framerates, and here the R9 Fury X soars. At 4K the R9 Fury X delivers a minimum framerate of 50.5fps, some 20% better than the GTX 980 Ti. Both cards do well enough here, but it goes without saying that this is a very distinct difference, and one that is well in AMD’s favor. The only downside for AMD here is that they can’t keep this advantage at 1440p, where they go back to trailing the GTX 980 Ti in minimum framerates by 7%.

On that note I do have one concern here with AMD’s support plans for Mantle. Mainly I’m worried that as well as the R9 Fury X does here, there’s a risk Mantle may stop working in the future. The GCN 1.2 based R9 285 can’t use the Mantle path at all (it crashes), and the R9 Fury X is not all that different in architecture.