The AMD Radeon R9 Fury Is Currently A Disaster On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 29 July 2015 at 11:40 AM EDT. Page 1 of 10. 82 Comments.

When AMD announced the Radeon R9 Fury line-up powered by the "Fiji" GPU with High Bandwidth Memory, I was genuinely very excited to get my hands on this graphics card. The tech sounded great and offered up a lot of potential, and once finally finding an R9 Fury in stock, shelled out nearly $600 for this graphics card. Unfortunately though, thanks to the current state of the Catalyst Linux driver, the R9 Fury on Linux is a gigantic waste for OpenGL workloads. The R9 Fury results only exemplifies the hideous state of AMD's OpenGL support for their Catalyst Linux driver with a NVIDIA graphics card costing $200 less consistently delivering better gaming performance.

The air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury launched earlier this month with its Fiji PRO GPU that is clocked at 1.00GHz (compared to 1.05GHz for the Fury X) with 3584 stream processors and features 8.9 billion transistors while being built on a 28nm process. Like the Fury X and the upcoming Fury Nano, this graphics card has 4GB of HBM that can deliver an unprecedented 512GB/s of memory bandwidth on a 4096 bit memory bus.

With this not being a review sample but a graphics card I bought retail, I went for the R9 Fury considering it was $100 cheaper than the R9 Fury X, the air-cooling was more practical, and I didn't know what to expect of the R9 Fury on Linux.

At first I was pursuing a R9 Fury X, but gave up on that over the short supplies at launch-time and the above factors. The good news for those wanting these Fury graphics card (Windows users), the availability now appears better with a few being in stock at Amazon.

The model being tested here under Linux today is the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury. This graphics card feature Sapphire's latest Tri-X Cooler, which is comprised of 90mm Aerofoil fans, multi-heatpipe array, stacked fins, and solid copper transfer plate for cooling the powerful Fiji chip. This Tri-X cooler supports the fans being turned off completely while the graphics card is under no load or minimal activity, in order to eliminate all noise.

This graphics card is equipped with three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI 1.4 output. Four monitors can be driven by this graphics card simultaneously or even six if using a DisplayPort MST hub or daisy-chaining. The R9 Fury does support all of AMD's latest technologies like Liquid VR and FreeSync, but for Linux users most of these extra details are irrelevant.

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