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

Far Cry 4

The next game in our 2015 GPU benchmark suite is Far Cry 4, Ubisoft’s Himalayan action game. A lot like Crysis 3, Far Cry 4 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with Ultra settings thanks to the game’s expansive environments.

Like the Talos Principle, this is another game that treats AMD well. The R9 Fury X doesn’t just beat the GTX 980 Ti at 4K Ultra, but it beats the GTX Titan X as well. Even 1440p Ultra isn’t too shabby, with a smaller gap but none the less the same outcome.

Overall what we find is that the R9 Fury X has a 9% lead at 4K Ultra, and a 4% lead at 1440p Ultra, making this one of the only games where AMD takes the lead at 1440p. However something interesting happens if we run at 4K with lower quality settings, and that lead evaporates very quickly, shifting to an NVIDIA lead by roughly the same amount. At this time I don’t have a good explanation for this other than to say that whatever is going on at Ultra, it clearly is very different from what happens at Medium quality, and it favors AMD.

Finally, the performance gains over the R9 290X are around average. At 4K and 1440p Ultra the R9 Fury X picks up 35%; at 4K Medium that shrinks to 30%.