Looks like I called it. From the HardOCP Fury review: Ouch. Typical AMD. Kept pushing this back and hiding benchmarks because they knew it was a fail. They made a vanilla GTX 980 competitor with super expensive memory almost a year after the 980 came out. Now they can't even compete with the vanilla 980 on price because the memory was so expensive. Poor AMD. They just can't catch a break lately.
It a meh card which is too bad. I think it would be competitive at around $600 but $650 is too high. It's also not as bad as HardOCP makes it look. They turned on the Nvidia gameworks features when possible and their scores seem to be lower across the board for Fury. Both Overclock3D and Toms hardware show the Fury as 10% faster than a 980 Ti in FarCry 4 at 1440p. HardOCP shows it 5% slower. Overclock3D actually shows the Fury winning at 1440p in about half of their test.
With their sliding market share, they needed to knock one out of the park. A ho hum card that's also overpriced is not what they needed right now. And they won't be able to drop the price without losing money due to the use of rare/expensive memory. They would have to undercut the 980 to get people to buy this card. They could price it somewhere between the 970 and 980 in the $350-450 range. But they would lose so much money if they did that. This could be the end for AMD. They couldn't afford another flop. That they hired a firm to help them figure out how to dismantle the company right before the reviews of this came out makes sense now. Hopefully a good company like Samsung buys the graphics division and does cool stuff with it.
Whats odd is they locked the voltage so there wont be any extreme overclocking unless they release their own tool. They bragged it was an over clockers dream card. We'll keep dreaming.
I could see that happening. Apple has used ATI/AMD graphics in a lot of their stuff. At the same time, prices would probably still be very high as Apple rivals nVidia in charging a premium for their products.
Well there is still Fury and Fury Nano to come. They wont be any faster but the pricing could be interesting. If Fury is $550 and 390X is $429 the Nano must be around $475. It's just a little odd that they will try to squeeze two more cards between Fury X and 390X. Seems like the 390X should disappear or drop in price a lot.
It seems strange with so much amazing tech the card is performing so badly. Either way I am going to skip this generation completely unless the asus strix 980ti really pulls out something. I am wondering whether the FuryX will become better as the drivers get better.. but knowing AMD and their shitty drivers this isn't going to happen any time soon. This is going to be a long wait till Pascal
It is an underwhelming product when AMD definitely needed something amazing. However, I wouldn't say it is overpriced when you consider the watercooler. I really don't think it's fair saying performance is more like GTX 980, in some games yes, but surely that is likely more of a driver issue. It is right up there with the 980Ti in many games, it just depends on the hardware/drivers/games/settings used by the particular review site. Like I said though, they really needed something that was at least consistently equal or better than the 980Ti at this point. Fury X is not that, which given AMD's normal 'value' perception, does make it seem like a lot of people will expect it to be cheaper. I personally think the price is fair compared to the competition - now, I don't agree with that pricing structure in the first place, but that's another matter.
Nano could cost the same as Fury while performing worse. You're paying for the lower TDP and small form factor ie. it's a perf/watt part not a perf/$ part. Much like lower TDP CPU's right now. Think i7 4790S vs i7 4790.
Makes you wonder if they didn't see the 980 Ti coming. I mean if it wasn't for that card being released just a few weeks back the Fury would be hailed a huge success. It's cool, it's quiet, and a good deal more powerful than the 980. And yeah the current pricing sucks. Has there ever been a generation where all the flagship cards were $650 to $1000?
Fury reviews are out and in summary compared to the 980 it's faster by 1080-1%, 1440-8%, 4k-18% but it also cost about 10% more. The higher OC 980s pretty much match it on performance and price. So I wouldn't call it a win or a lose. It's just Meh. The only thing it really wins at is noise and that's actually pretty amazing. http://www.anandtech.com/print/9421/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-review-feat-sapphire-asus
"Meh" is a good description of their HBM cards. They're expensive, late, and they basically just match nVidia. I expect AMD's GPU market share to decline even further. People who were holding out for these cards will probably just go with the 980 or 980Ti. The 980 is a better value, and the 980Ti is faster.
I think value wise the Fury is decent based on today's market. It really should be $500 with the Fury X being $600. For people looking towards 4K it's a better choice than the 980. For the small percentage building a high-end 4k gaming machine crossfire Furys will be even more attractive. But really the 980ti is still the best value by far despite being so expensive.
It's not a bad card and HBM is still young, this is the first attempt. I expect nVidia to go the HBM route soon, only so far they can go with DDR.
The Nano details should be coming soon and I'm still curious where it will fall in the charts. It's a full Fury X with reduced clocks. Will it be faster or slower than the Fury and what will the price be? The charts are pretty full now from the 980 down. Fury is a little faster than the 980 and $80 more. The 390X is even with the stock 980 and about $50 less than the 980 OC. I suppose it possible it might be slower than the 390X and be marketed as a low-power and silent media PC card.
AMD just dropped the price of the Nano by $150. It was kind of a a niche card but now it's priced right in line with the 980 GTX. I found them both for $460 on Newegg. I wonder if they will be dropping the Fury any time soon.
Yeah the Fury is meant to be dropping soon also. Still too much for me considering new cards are only ~6 months off. At least the Nano runs nice and cool/quiet, but new cards will probably bring that performance in <150w parts for hopefully under $300.