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AMD is leading us into a new, exciting era of graphics technology - where ultra-fast memory is connected directly to the core, enabling higher performance, enhanced power efficiency and a new wave of small form-factor graphics cards. The Radeon R9 Fury X is the first GPU to arrive boasting this cutting-edge tech, with AMD telling us that it is the fastest single-chip GPU on the market, a title currently held by Nvidia's mammoth Titan X 12GB. Well, the reality is that the Fury X is a fascinating first-gen product with plenty of positives, but in terms of raw performance, both Nvidia's Titan X and its cut-down GTX 980 Ti are generally faster and more versatile for the high-end enthusiast market.As always, performance is king, so AMD's inability to be comprehensively competitive with Nvidia's GM200 across the length and breadth of our benchmarks is a little disappointing - but certainly in terms of the physical package, it's great to see that the poor reference cooling design of the 200 series is now a thing of the past. The Fury X is built from quality materials that look good and even feel good, and the dinky, compact nature of the 7.5-inch board is quite remarkable - it's a marvel of integration. The work AMD carried out on the Radeon R9 295X2's reference water cooler is carried over and refined on Fury X, which also has its own closed-loop set-up that is significantly quieter than Nvidia's reference coolers, though it is accompanied by a continuous, consistent, high-pitched tone - presumably emanating from the pump. It was a little bothersome on the test bench, but will hopefully be less of an issue when the card is installed deep within a decent case.
The Fiji processor in the R9 Fury X is based on AMD's third generation GCN architecture, previously found in the R9 295/380, and codenamed Tonga. Doubling up on stream processors brings the shader count up to a gargantuan 4096, up from the 2816 found in the R9 290X/390X. This core is then combined with the ultra-fast, ultra-wide HBM RAM.
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