AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Launches Today, Initial Results A Bit Of A Let Down

After being announced earlier this month and the Radeon Rx 300 series launching last week, the $649+ R9 Fury X water-cooled graphics card launches today. With the launch comes a whole bunch of (Windows) reviews too.

While I didn't have a Radeon R9 Fury X review sample, waking up this morning I was excited to go online and start looking for deals on the Fury X in order to be the first to test it out under Linux on Phoronix. While waiting for this first graphics card using HBM memory to appear on online retailers, I started looking through a few of the Windows reviews. Surprisingly, it's not as good as talked up on paper.

This $649+ graphics card has a hard time competing with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti but is rather more comparable to the GTX 980, which costs under $500. The Fury X 4K gaming performance also left a lot to be desired. On paper the card is very impressive especially with its use of High Bandwidth Memory, but the results seen so far today aren't that great -- albeit a big step up from the Radeon R9 290 series.

With Windows reviewers even mentioning driver shortcomings for the Fury X, it's a bit scary to wonder what kind of shape this Fiji GPU is in under Linux with Catalyst... For Linux users there's only Catalyst as there isn't yet an open-source AMD Fiji GPU driver.

At the moment I'm still shopping around for the Radeon R9 Fury X, but I may end up just holding off until the air-cooled version ships next month that's cheaper and hopefully by then the Catalyst driver will be in better shape for Fiji... Share your thoughts by commenting on this article in our forums and regardless there will be AMD Fury/Fiji benchmarks on Phoronix quite soon.