AMD Fury X Postmortem: What Went Wrong?

[YBS1]

No need bait like that. (goes for both)

It does fine for 4k. If you don't overclock it's not far off the reference 980 ti, basically trading blows.

Small form factor.

Sure it's not the best option, but it's not a horrible card either like you try to imply.

No,it's not a horrible card at all. If I was running 4K resolution I think I just might go for it over the Ti. Reasons being it's a pretty close race as it sits right now. I assume it will get somewhat better on more mature drivers. I'd have to think there would be voltage tools available soon. Knowing I wouldn't run either of these cards at 4K solo, if I assume this behaves as the 290s did, Crossfire scaled a bit better than SLi, so it's got that going for it as well. The reasons I might not include AMD's typically slower support for new games and Crossfire profiles, GamedontWerks©, and the 980's already known strong overclocking potential.

 

[BFG10K]

That doesn't change the fact that the card is not worth that price based on its performance.

Exactly the same applies to the Titan-X, yet it continues to sell, and we never see a "Titan-X post-mortem: why the hell is it still $1000" thread.

Obviously the market tolerates nVidia's behavior, so why shouldn't AMD act the same way?

 

[amenx]

Exactly the same applies to the Titan-X, yet it continues to sell, and we never see a "Titan-X post-mortem: why the hell is it still $1000" thread.

Obviously the market tolerates nVidia's behavior, so why shouldn't AMD act the same way?

Theres an exclusive 'luxury' (or e-peen if you will) segment of the GPU market that is separate from the rest of it. Thats where the TX fits. Similar to ferrari vs corvette argument.

There may also be enthusiasts where money is not an issue and when TX came out, there was nothing like it for 3 months. Furyx and 980ti value are largely non-issues to that category of enthusiasts.

 

[BigDaveX]

A more valid comparison for the Titan-X would probably be the Fury X2 that we'll eventually see. They're both halo products, designed for those who don't mind paying out the absolute top-dollar.

Besides, chances are AMD would have been able to legitimately command a much higher price tag if the 980Ti didn't exist. The Fury X would have fitted beautifully into the price-performance gap between the 980 and Titan-X, but the 980Ti seems to have wrong-footed them in a big way.

 

[Enigmoid]

I think the problem with Fury X is in some way HBM.

Why? AMD felt that, because the card has HBM, it needs to be the highest of high end, to target the 980Ti. However, its very difficult to make a card to target that level of performance. Not only that, but HBM's immaturity means that only 4GB of RAM is possible. Not that the amount really matters - we have seen that it still does amazingly well in 4K benchmarks. My point is that, not only is the performance slightly short of the 980Ti, but with the memory being smaller too, it means the Fury X is not as future proof.

I personally think they should have repeated the 4870. Made a card similar to the 290X, maybe a little more optimized if they can, with 4GB of HBM. Price it competitively, make it a card that can beat a 970 in all situations, and you will have hordes of fans. It would sell very well.

Very few people are going to buy the Fury X. The problem with aiming for a halo product like the 980 Ti, is that if you shoot and miss, you lose everything. Very few people will buy it, because it is not a convincing win.

If you're going to spend $650 on a graphics card, you want to know you are getting the best. The Fury X is not the best, so why spend $650 on it?

If they were going with +20% shaders over the 290X they should have just dropped HBM completely. GB for GB at this time HBM is probably twice as expensive as GDDR5 and you have the cost of the interposer ($1 per 100 mm^2 is about $10) though you can cut down the on the PCB.

AMD is being a little stupid here IMO. Nvidia is the premium company and WILL defend their premium products. The 'cheaper' company image AMD has is too big of a hole to climb out of at this moment (while their CPUs suck and are a concrete block around their ankles). Going after the low volume top end is pretty silly, especially given how aggressively Nvidia priced the 970.

Fury should have never made it off the drawing board. 4 GB Vram prevents it from being sold in any large numbers in the professional market (at least they castrated DP). AMD should have realized that the costs of fury were too high with HBM and an interposer and the break even cost was prohibitive. After the disaster that was Tonga AMD should have been more careful about releasing new cards.

GCN has continued to improve via drivers pretty much since the first update after 7970 launch. Odds are there is quite a bit of tweaking necessary to match GCN up with HBM rather than GDDR5 to take full advantage of the lower latency and wider bus.

HBM does not have lower latency. Transmission latency is lower and the memory chips are right next to the die but the HBM chips run at a much lower frequency (500 mhz vs. 1500 mhz) canceling most of the transmisson inprovements. Look at the hyrix slides. About 40-48 ns latency for GDDR5 and HBM.

 

[utahraptor]

I think the investors are on the same page as the OP. The stock has lost nearly 7% value today alone.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I think the investors are on the same page as the OP. The stock has lost nearly 7% value today alone.

Today's drop is probably due to Micron saying that PC builds were worse than expected.

 

[boozzer]

how many people here truly believe that titan x is a "luxury" product? premium product? not trolling?

 

[ocre]

Exactly the same applies to the Titan-X, yet it continues to sell, and we never see a "Titan-X post-mortem: why the hell is it still $1000" thread.

Obviously the market tolerates nVidia's behavior, so why shouldn't AMD act the same way?

That is crazy.

Every since the 980ti lunched, just about everyone declared the titanX dead/ irrelevant

 

[boozzer]

That is crazy.

Every since the 980ti lunched, just about everyone declared the titanX dead/ irrelevant

are you reading the same thread as I am? they are calling it a "premium", "luxury" product. :awe::twisted:^_^

 

[Stuka87]

HBM does not have lower latency. Transmission latency is lower and the memory chips are right next to the die but the HBM chips run at a much lower frequency (500 mhz vs. 1500 mhz) canceling most of the transmisson inprovements. Look at the hyrix slides. About 40-48 ns latency for GDDR5 and HBM.

The lower frequency has nothing to do with the latency shown in those slides. The 500MHz vs 1500MHz is for the bus, this affects bandwidth. HMB has a FAR wider bus, so even with the lower clock rate for the bus, overall bandwidth is far greater.

 

[Stuka87]

AMD is being a little stupid here IMO. Nvidia is the premium company and WILL defend their premium products. The 'cheaper' company image AMD has is too big of a hole to climb out of at this moment (while their CPUs suck and are a concrete block around their ankles). Going after the low volume top end is pretty silly, especially given how aggressively Nvidia priced the 970.

nVidia is *perceived* as a premium company by some. There is nothing really premium about the vast majority of their products. Ask Kepler owners if they think nVidia is a premium company after having their cards forgotten about.

AMD did the right thing going to HBM now. Work out all the growing pains now, so at the node shrink, they have everything worked out.

nVidia is going to be going through these same issues when they eventually make the move to use it.

 

[Headfoot]

"Premium" and "luxury" are the lines that get trotted out when it's clear there are no real arguments left.

 

[xthetenth]

NV is a premium company. Just remember that a premium is something you pay and maybe something you get.

 

[BigDaveX]

"Premium" and "luxury" are the lines that get trotted out when it's clear there are no real arguments left.

Right. Because coming up with a strawman argument about a card that even most nVidia fans will admit is overpriced for 98% of usage cases is the sign of a sound line of reasoning.

Besides, I can tell you of at least one usage case where a Titan X would be fully justified. I frequently use an After Effects plug-in which uses the GPU to handle 3D rendering. At 1080P in an effects-heavy sequence, this uses around 2.5-3.5GB of video memory. Bump that up to 4K, and... well, you can probably do the math.

 

[Nhirlathothep]

with no competition:


1 they call mid range card gtx 980 and sell it at higher price
2 after some months they sell high performance card as "titanx" for 999$
3 then they give you the about same card for "only" 649$. tou can say thanks

in a parallel world with a solid competitor (amd) the card you know as 980 should be called gtx 960 and titanx -------> gtx 980

 

[Headfoot]

Right. Because coming up with a strawman argument about a card that even most nVidia fans will admit is overpriced for 98% of usage cases is the sign of a sound line of reasoning.

I dont think strawman means what you think it means...

 

[Mako88]

with no competition:


1 they call mid range card gtx 980 and sell it at higher price
2 after some months they sell high performance card as "titanx" for 999$
3 then they give you the about same card for "only" 649$. tou can say thanks

in a parallel world with a solid competitor (amd) the card you know as 980 should be called gtx 960 and titanx -------> gtx 980

Agree.

And worse, Nvidia only priced the 980 Ti at $649 because they wanted to put the screws to AMD's profit margins on the two Fury X SKUs. That's it. Otherwise it would have been far more expensive.

The rumors about 980 Ti being a "$799" card two months ago were absolutely 100% true. But Nvidia decided to drop the hammer on AMD, kick them while they're down financially, and reduced the 980 Ti price to a level that screwed Titan X owners, but simultaneously guarantees that AMD will never make a significant profit on Fury X.

That's what happens when you have competition...prices tend to not inflate as quickly. Without competition, 980 Ti is a $799 or $849 product all day long, because that fits with the Titan X pricing scale for performance per dollar.

 

[looncraz]

Funny enough when nvidia put out cards with reference coolers that end up getting the GPU throttled, we don't see the same tainting.

This, very much this!

I remember reading the Titan X reviews and the reviews were just like "Oh, and this things gets loud, like R290X loud. But, it's a must buy! It offers extra performance for the noise!"

Yeah, and the 290X was faster than the $1,000 nVidia competition at half the price... but the comments, then, were akin to:

"Oh no!! This thing is **LOUD LOUD LOUD** OH NO!! Do NOT buy!! This thing also runs at 95C, by design! DO NOT BUY!! Oh woe is me! Your house will burn down!! Buy a GTX 780 instead!! It might be about 20% slower, but it runs cooler and costs more and can be overclocked to be almost as fast as the 290X in uber mode!!"

Yeah, no bias in the reviews at all.

 

[Enigmoid]

AMD did the right thing going to HBM now. Work out all the growing pains now, so at the node shrink, they have everything worked out.

nVidia is going to be going through these same issues when they eventually make the move to use it.

I think this issue is a little overblown. Both companies have been waiting so long for 14 nm (and delay between getting fabbed samples and actually producing production quantities due to the higher 14nm costs is going to be very long) that these kinks should be fixed by the time anything actually launches.

DO NOT confuse launched products with what is cooking in a company's lab. A lot of things also never see the light of day either.

 

[Mako88]

I think this issue is a little overblown. Both companies have been waiting so long for 14 nm (and delay between getting fabbed samples and actually producing production quantities due to the higher 14nm costs is going to be very long) that these kinks should be fixed by the time anything actually launches.

DO NOT confuse launched products with what is cooking in a company's lab. A lot of things also never see the light of day either.

Also agree. There is no advantage to AMD "going to HBM now versus later". And memory bandwidth doesn't affect fps much anyway, as the Fury X's results show.

You can downclock a Titan X's memory by -50%, half as fast as stock speeds, and in-game fps rates only fall by 12%.

And conversely, you can overclock a Titan X's memory by 15%, and you won't gain a single frame of performance improvement.

A lot of us said this months ago, warned people that HBM on its own wasn't going to add anything besides packaging advantages versus current GDDR5, and that no one should feel that it would be some sort of performance revolution because it simply isn't.

Unfortunately that's now why so many feel "disappointed" by the Fury X, they bought into the HBM hype and insanely believed that the card would somehow outperform a 980 Ti or Titan X by "+40%", which of course was laughable to begin with.

 

[tential]

The main issue with fury for me is branding. It's branded as a whole new line but it competes at the same spot the 290x did vs the Titan. Except now I pay a premium for a fury branded lineup.
I have no problem paying a premium but amd hasn't had its shit together over the last 3 years in away way to be demanding a premium. For fury x to be a success, they could have delivered the same product as today, just actually polished. Amd fury x launch doesn't seem polished it seems like a "we planned this month's in advance... Maybe we should get some voltage tools and some other things in place so the launch is a success? Nope!".

It's a hard sell when your premium product isn't treated as premium by the company and this goes for nvidia as well with the original Titan. I just don't have faith that a big purchase will remotely pay off.

 

[YBS1]

"Oh no!! This thing is **LOUD LOUD LOUD** OH NO!! Do NOT buy!! This thing also runs at 95C, by design! DO NOT BUY!! Oh woe is me! Your house will burn down!! Buy a GTX 780 instead!! It might be about 20% slower, but it runs cooler and costs more and can be overclocked to be almost as fast as the 290X in uber mode!!"

Here we go again with the history rewrites, the 290X wasn't faster than the currently available 780s when it came out PERIOD. In fact I remember clearly being involved along with BallaTheFeared against members who had 290Xs in a bit of a bench off in which most of the titles selected were said to be AMD favored titles....it didn't go well for the 290s.

 

[Mako88]

The main issue with fury for me is branding. It's branded as a whole new line but it competes at the same spot the 290x did vs the Titan. Except now I pay a premium for a fury branded lineup.
I have no problem paying a premium but amd hasn't had its shit together over the last 3 years in away way to be demanding a premium. For fury x to be a success, they could have delivered the same product as today, just actually polished. Amd fury x launch doesn't seem polished it seems like a "we planned this month's in advance... Maybe we should get some voltage tools and some other things in place so the launch is a success? Nope!".

It's a hard sell when your premium product isn't treated as premium by the company and this goes for nvidia as well with the original Titan. I just don't have faith that a big purchase will remotely pay off.

I don't mind the branding, they went for their own "Titan" and it backfired a bit, but I do like the "Fury" name being brought in to represent their top line products.

The real problem is profit margin, there simply isn't enough in a water-cooled Fury X to have the price sit at $599 comfortably. And surpisingly that would have made a big difference, just -$50 to 980 Ti would have cut off a lot of the snark and negativity that now surrounds the Fury X.

It would have been perceived as a much better value.

But who knows, if the air version has a non-cut down full core, and sells at $549, that's a hell of a bargain and might wind up being the savior the company wanted to begin with. Stupid that they didn't launch together in hindsight.

The end line of the Fury X meme video says it well, sometimes we get distracted by the top SKU war, but in reality the battle is won/lost lower in the chain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhVo7yPjQvE

 

[JDG1980]

Here we go again with the history rewrites, the 290X wasn't faster than the currently available 780s when it came out PERIOD. In fact I remember clearly being involved along with BallaTheFeared against members who had 290Xs in a bit of a bench off in which most of the titles selected were said to be AMD favored titles....it didn't go well for the 290s.

AMD's initial release of Hawaii is a good example of how a solid product can be let down by poor marketing choices. There never should have been a reference design in the first place if they couldn't do it right; AIB cards should have been available on Day 1. AMD should have sent out Sapphire Tri-X Hawaii cards to reviewers, which would have decisively beaten what Nvidia had to offer at that time, and wouldn't have had all the issues with noise and heat that the reference models did.