AMD is expected to release the much-anticipated Radeon R9 Fury X2 before the year ends. However, many are curious if its specs and performance can stand against the NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti .
The AMD R9 Fury X2 made headlines earlier this year as the company announced it was going to be the GPU industry's first HBM graphics card. It will be based on AMD's HBM GPU codenamed Fiji.
Though AMD hasn't officially given the graphics card an official commercial name yet, everyone refers to it as the R9 Fury X2. The new graphics card is slated for a Q4 or holiday release.
Another interesting fact is that the R9 Fury X2 is reportedly the fourth and last Fiji-based graphics card this year. The Radeon graphics card will have two dedicated Fiji XT GPUs each with 4GB of stacked High Bandwidth Memory, hence the HBM term. In total, it would run on 8GB of stacked HBM, according to TechFrag.
Technically, it's still two graphics cards without the need for AMD CrossFireX configuration. Another advantage is that it would only need one PCIE slot instead of two. A user can choose to buy two Radeon R9 Fuxy X2 if it would support CrossFireX as well.
How will it compare with the NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti? There are no actual figures yet on benchmarks for the Radeon R9 Fury X2, but the specs are already out.
AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X2 has 8192 Stream Processors and GCN Compute Units, according to WCCFTech. That figure is actually double compared to its predecessors.
NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti on the otherhand, has only 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 2816 of their CUDA Cores. It also has 1000 Mhz for its clock speed, while AMD hasn't announced the R9 Fury X2's speed yet.
Perhaps the biggest difference lies in the floating-point performance between the two. The NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti has 5,632 GLOPS, while the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 has a whopping 17,204 GFLOPS. The R9 Fury X2 also has more texture mapping units at 512, according to GPU Boss. The GTX 980 Ti only has 176.
Still, the GTX 980 Ti is better at some aspects. It has a higher memory clock speed of 1,753 MHz compared to the X2's 500 MHz.
Gamers and high-end rig builders will need to wait for the actual benchmarks when the Radeon graphics card is out. It may even compete with the NVIDIA GTX Titan X.
There are only a couple of months remaining before the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 will be launched. Price is to be announced; but considering the Fury X's market price of $649, it is likely to go for a higher range than that.
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