AMD Radeon R9 Fury X tested: not quite a 980 Ti killer

Amd Radeon R9 Fury X Lead

The AMD R9 Fury X is not the 4K champion, 980 Ti killer AMD would like it to be. Based on my time testing this new graphics card with high bandwidth memory, it’s fast— sometimes neck-and-neck with Nvidia’s equally priced 980 Ti—but not quite fast enough, often falling about 10 percent short of Nvidia’s card in average framerates, across a range of games.

This isn’t a full, comprehensive review of the Fury X, because I haven’t had enough time with the card to provide a complete analysis (thanks, E3!). I’ve had a full day’s testing to put the card through its paces at 1080p, 1440p and 2160p in a number of game benchmarks. It’s enough testing to have a confident overview of the Fury X’s performance and how it stacks up against the competition, minus one important element: overclocking.

For starters, here’s the usual spec breakdown of the R9 Fury X and its major competitors.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).