AMD Fury X Postmortem: What Went Wrong?

[railven]

You know what's wrong with Fury X?

They don't make enough since its sold out everywhere here.

Yerp, and it's going to cost them sales.

 

[crisium]

That's why they went with $650 too. While we all know it would be more attractive at $550, if they sell out all of their limited stock anyway then pricing it any lower would be them throwing away money.

It does hurt mind share a bit though, as many see AMD is idiotic to price it the same a 980 Ti when it is slower.

 

[rgallant]

You know what's wrong with Fury X?

They don't make enough since its sold out everywhere here.

have to wonder if the pump change out put them way behind.

-if they did not have any of the new pumps for the review samples , that is all telling of the new pump supply imo.

 

[Qwertilot]

Much more likely to be down to HBM I'd think.

If they could be confident of producing these things in big numbers in a month or two they'd surely have ditched the whole 380/90 stack for them/the cut down ones coming rather than running the two at once like they're doing.

 

[railven]

Much more likely to be down to HBM I'd think.

If they could be confident of producing these things in big numbers in a month or two they'd surely have ditched the whole 380/90 stack for them/the cut down ones coming rather than running the two at once like they're doing.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are fabbing Hawaii chips in big numbers anymore. I'd still wager all current 300-series card are being made from chips already made and unable to sell.

Would explain why the 200-series went bone dry so quickly.

 

[Dresdenboy]

Its nothing to do with HBM. That excuse needs to go away by now. However its GCN 1.2. And the 285 aka 380 didnt get much love on that matter. So what love there is to give we have to see. But they had their time to work on it. The 285 wasnt released yesterday.

Development is kind of pipelined. If sth turns out to work not that well, they can deliver the fix/improvement at least 2 gens later, not earlier.


BTW the Sapphire card was #1 bestseller after the reviews?

Looks like many buyers don't care that much about not so good <4K performance, if they care about reviews at all.

 

[railven]

Development is kind of pipelined. If sth turns out to work not that well, they can deliver the fix/improvement at least 2 gens later, not earlier.


BTW the Sapphire card was #1 bestseller after the reviews?

Looks like many buyers don't care that much about not so good <4K performance, if they care about reviews at all.

As a console war veteran, don't go by those charts. Xbone has had huge surges after key title releases only to still lose the total sales for the month.

All this tells you is that they sold faster than any of the other products on hand for a given period. Wait until stock is plentiful, magically it won't be a mover and shaker anymore. I call it "Xbone Syndrome."

"It's sold out every where, it has to be the best!"

 

[shady28]

Development is kind of pipelined. If sth turns out to work not that well, they can deliver the fix/improvement at least 2 gens later, not earlier.


BTW the Sapphire card was #1 bestseller after the reviews?

Looks like many buyers don't care that much about not so good <4K performance, if they care about reviews at all.

Best of the Fury X sellers, maybe.

These are the 12 best selling GPUs. 970 is a major seller based on this. #1 is currently the 980 Ti.

There is only one AMD card here, #10, an R9 280 3GB.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Best of the Fury X sellers, maybe.

These are the 12 best selling GPUs. 970 is a major seller based on this. #1 is currently the 980 Ti.

There is only one AMD card here, #10, an R9 280 3GB.

Seems to match what reviewers say. Supply is very low and even replacement for faulty cards is almost impossible.

 

[shady28]

Seems to match what reviewers say. Supply is very low and even replacement for faulty cards is almost impossible.

And the steam HW survey. For dGPU the #1 increase in their hardware survey share was the 970 with + 0.4%, #2 was the 960 with + 0.3%.

The 7660G also had a +0.3% rise but that is an APU, part of the A10-4600M mobile line. Neither Fury nor 980 Ti show up, which means their numbers are too small (usually Steam does not report < 0.3% share) and are subsumed into "other".

 

[ShintaiDK]

Amazon best sellers:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Computer-Graphics-Cards/zgbs/electronics/284822

 

[Hitman928]

Best of the Fury X sellers, maybe.

These are the 12 best selling GPUs. 970 is a major seller based on this. #1 is currently the 980 Ti.

There is only one AMD card here, #10, an R9 280 3GB.

The amazon best seller list is updated hourly, so once the Fury X sold out, it was off the list but right after release, it looks like it was number 1. I'm not saying it sold a lot by any means, just that for that 1st hour they sold whatever stock they had which momentarily made it jump to #1 and then off the charts again. I'm not expecting much market share in total for the Fury X even after stock issues are solved.

 

[railven]

The amazon best seller list is updated hourly, so once the Fury X sold out, it was off the list but right after release, it looks like it was number 1. I'm not saying it sold a lot by any means, just that for that 1st hour they sold whatever stock they had which momentarily made it jump to #1 and then off the charts again. I'm not expecting much market share in total for the Fury X even after stock issues are solved.

Oh, it definitely sold a lot, considering it sold out it's stock. But this never tells you how much it sold.

That's why people trying to use Amazon sales trends as any kind of market share shifts usually end with egg on their face.

 

[raghu78]

well what wrong with Fury X is what always goes wrong with AMD. sub-par launch drivers Perf scaling over R9 390X varies widly from game to game with games like Farcry 4/AC unity improving by 25-35% while games like Dragon Age Inquisition improving by just 15% at 1440p. This wild swing is what badly hurts average performance over reviewers game test suites

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...9682-amd-r9-fury-x-review-fiji-arrives-9.html

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...682-amd-r9-fury-x-review-fiji-arrives-10.html

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...682-amd-r9-fury-x-review-fiji-arrives-11.html

This is the biggest problem with AMD. They have not delivered a flawless launch since ages like the HD 4870 or HD 5870. There is something always they manage to mess up. Right now I think they are just not having the cash to compete with Nvidia and keep developing world class GPU hardware and software. Years of bleeding due to that disastrous and wretched Bulldozer seems to have finally taken a toll.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I say the Fury X got 3 major problems.

4GB just isnt enough for a flagship. And this also bites them hard in the pro segment where Fiji will be a non product until 14nm shrink with hbm2. Its tragicomic at best when AMD itself tries to upsell 8GB over 4GB in the 390/390X.

Water cooling was a fun hotfix idea for throttle and power consumption, until the RMA flood started. If we exclude the limitation it gives on its own.

Price, you cant charge the same price with subpair features and so on for a card with less VRAM, less performance and higher power draw.

 

[guskline]

I say the Fury X got 3 major problems.

4GB just isnt enough for a flagship. And this also bites them hard in the pro segment where Fiji will be a non product until 14nm shrink with hbm2. Its tragicomic at best when AMD itself tries to upsell 8GB over 4GB in the 390/390X.

Water cooling was a fun hotfix idea for throttle and power consumption, until the RMA flood started. If we exclude the limitation it gives on its own.

Price, you cant charge the same price with subpair features and so on for a card with less VRAM, less performance and higher power draw.

ShintaiDK

Fair points. It so hard to determine the impact of HBM type memory because it's so new. Nvidia's pricing of the GTX980 TI really hurts AMD's ability to argue the Fury X is better at the same price.

I wonder what Cooler Master pump they used for the newest models vs the original ones.

The other factor is the aftermarket GTX980 TIs are only $30-$50 more than stock and OC so much more. The Fury X appears to have very little OCing room.

I will give them credit. Compared to the previous flagship, Hawaii, The Fiji gets them closer to the rearview mirror of the TitanX and GTX980TI and in a few cases they take the lead. The problem is Nvidia has so much headroom in the Maxwell. Nvidia partners just bump the stock core a bit and are safely in the lead.

 

[ShintaiDK]

There isnt any HBM magic. Its memory like any other. AMD even have to dedicate 2 people to try and hand manage the 4GB pool in relation to games. Its an ugly hotfix and will die out as quickly as AMD loses interest in doing so. And we already see problems trying to hand manage this.

 

[guskline]

There isnt any HBM magic. Its memory like any other. AMD even have to dedicate 2 people to try and hand manage the 4GB pool in relation to games. Its an ugly hotfix and will die out as quickly as AMD loses interest in doing so. And we already see problems trying to hand manage this.

Will HBM2 make a more significant overall impact?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Will HBM2 make a more significant overall impact?

Since HBM2 actually offers a speed upgrade then yes. It should be around 60% faster than HBM1. Plus you dont have to sacrifice memory amount.

 

[shady28]

Since HBM2 actually offers a speed upgrade then yes. It should be around 60% faster than HBM1. Plus you dont have to sacrifice memory amount.

It's too bad we don't have a way to graph / monitor actual memory bandwidth being used in a particular bench.

How much of a difference more memory bandwidth will make in actual performance will depend on what the limiting factor in a particular game / resolution is.

We can already see where 980 Ti at 338GB/s with GDDR5 is faster in 1080p and 1440p than Fury HBM with 512 GB/s. The obvious conclusion is that Fury is not memory bandwidth limited in those scenarios, if it were it would be faster than 980 Ti. The implication is that the GPU itself in Fury is limited by things other than memory bandwidth vs 980 Ti GM200.

At 4K, the tables turn. The GM200 gets memory bandwidth limited, which nullifies the faster GPU, while the Fury becomes either memory bandwidth limited or its GPU limited but at a higher bandwidth than the GM200 has (somewhere between 338 and 512).

Based on that, I don't think either Fury or Maxwell is going to be able to really use 1,024GB/s except in very narrow use cases. They will need more efficient / newer arch.

 

[Silverforce11]

There isnt any HBM magic. Its memory like any other. AMD even have to dedicate 2 people to try and hand manage the 4GB pool in relation to games. Its an ugly hotfix and will die out as quickly as AMD loses interest in doing so. And we already see problems trying to hand manage this.

Driver bug, does not occur on older drivers. The Batman: AK ready driver causes stutters in GTA V, known issue.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Driver bug, does not occur on older drivers. The Batman: AK ready driver causes stutters in GTA V, known issue.

15.15 drivers was used. What older drivers support Fury X?

 

[Lepton87]

That's why they went with $650 too. While we all know it would be more attractive at $550, if they sell out all of their limited stock anyway then pricing it any lower would be them throwing away money.

It does hurt mind share a bit though, as many see AMD is idiotic to price it the same a 980 Ti when it is slower.

It's barely any slower and has a way better cooling, I can see reason in sacrificing some performance for a way better cooling that is compared to a reference 980Ti but in comparison with a 980Ti G1 it becomes noticeably slower that and less memory made it an easy choice for me.

 

[derfop]

There isnt any HBM magic. Its memory like any other. AMD even have to dedicate 2 people to try and hand manage the 4GB pool in relation to games. Its an ugly hotfix and will die out as quickly as AMD loses interest in doing so. And we already see problems trying to hand manage this.

Likely not a vram issue, since neither the 290X or 295X2 sees such a dramatic and unexpected dip in framerate.

 

[mohit9206]

With the Fury X atleast AMD fans can be happy that it performs just as well as 980ti, consumes less power and costs the same too so atleast it does not lose even though it does not win. Its good enough for AMD fans to stick with AMD but it won't get any Nvidia fans to switch over either. I say its a draw but AMD won't be gaining any market share with this generation graphics cards because none of their products stands out but none of them are bad either. They need something interesting and R9 Nano could be that product.