Tech Guru wroteIt worth the Wait from a Tech Site I always Trust in their reviews that tackle technology in depth that some time I find throwing ver technical things which are ambiguous to me to understand with the 1st read. Great Job AnandTech your tackled all the Pros & Cons of the Fury X and you compare it objectively with the 980Ti (Especially by showing the Minimum FPS and not only stick with the Average FPS) ; also a great review about the technical HBM limitation (now) for a max of 4 GB VRAM.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review
At the end of the day:
Unfortunately, for AMD Fury X will go down as an underwhelming product that failed to meet the overhyped build up from AMD and their fans. Its not a terrible product by itself, as it does perform quite well, but it simply didn't live up to its billing, much of which came directly from AMD themselves when they made very public claims like:
1) HBM enables them to make the World's Fastest GPU. This didn't happen.
2) Easily beats the 980Ti, based on their internal benchmarks. This didn't happen either.
3) Fury X is an Overclocker's Dream. We've seen anything but this being the case.
4) Water Cooling allows this to be a cool and quiet part. Except that pump whine, that AMD said was fixed in shipping samples, but wasn't.
5) 4GB is enough. Doesn't look like it, especially at the resolutions and settings a card like this is expected to run.
Add to that the very limited supply at launch and Fury X launch will ultimately be viewed as a flop. I just don't know where AMD is going to go from here. R9 300 Rebrandeon happened and those parts still aren't selling. R9 Fury X while still AMD's best performing part is still 3rd fastest overall at the same price point as the faster 980Ti, and in extremely limited supplies. Will this be enough to sustain AMD into 2016 where the hopes of Zen and Arctic Islands turning around their fortunes loom on the horizon, we'll see, but until then it will be a bumpy road for AMD with some cloudy skies on the horizon!
Fury X in Cross Fire are good but nothing phenomenal ; but you need to plan ahead where to find space for two big radiators as an exhaust fans / & keep your inside components well cooled ( in other words it will be a mass).
For Cross Fire: I have one questions does the HBM Stack which means as 8 Vram and not as 4 Vram ; this is an interesting matter / tried to google it but nothing found on such topic :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXk2Gk5D3ZI
(Great Fury X Cross Fire vs 980 Ti SLI Review).
^This again :D
The interposer of first gen HBM can only support 4GB of VRAM, it's that simple, you won't run into problems in most console ports as they only use 2-3GB of VRAM, and most games that are PC-only or have a Remastered version use less than 4GB, the only notable exceptions being Skyrim with a fuckton of mods, and some games that have uncompressed texture packs. Using more than 4GB of VRAM is actually tribute to the developer's laziness, if developers gave time to compressing textures so that games had fully compressed textures, you wouldn't need more than 3-4GB of VRAM.
The Fury X is underwhelming ? I guess that's why it's sold out everywhere, the Fury X has been great for AMD. Again, you're practically comparing apples to pears, you're comparing a card that had been released for a long time and had time to get fully optimized drivers against a card that has been launched for less than a month. The Fury X has something the 980 Ti lacks, and that's potential, give it some drivers, a la AMD's performance increasing drivers they've been renowned for, and the Fury X will have it's throne.
It will actually beat the 980 Ti if you use the settings used by AMD, they have been open enough to give the exact settings they used to test the games and the Fury X emerges victorious in all of them.
Voltages still haven't been unlocked so you still cannot judge based on the overclocking potential at stock voltages.
Pump whine has been fixed, one can remove the frontplate and see, if it has Cooler Master written in chrome, it doesn't have pump whine, if the Cooler Master logo is in colors it may have pump whine. I have to admit, AMD deserves a smack on thy head for even considering Cooler Master for the AIO, Asetek and Coolit are way better than CM, but if Cooler Master is know for it's price vs the competition.
4GB has proved enough for anything but GTA V and Shadow of Mordor's ultra texture pack, which you won't possibly be running at 4K as it won't be needed for SoM or simply can't be run at ultra for GTA V.
AMD have actually had a very good Q2, they even managed to profit, they Fury X won't be a flop, you're basing yourself on what expectations ? In the only period it had been available in, it sold out, if AMD launch the new drivers, it'll also be sold out. Rebrandeon ? you cannot call any card in the 300 series a rebrand, a rebrand is when a card is sold as another will only being underclocked or overclocked like the GTX 670 and 760 and the GTX 680 and 770, AMD heavily modified and improved the chips, the R9 380, 390 and 390X manage to beat the R9 285, 290 and 290X if you run them at the same clocks, by a good margin, the R9 290X used to go blow-for-blow with the GTX 970, the R9 390 manages to beat the GTX 970 in 80% of games. I'm fairly positive about Zen and Arctic Islands, 14nm FinFET and 16nm FinFET respectively with 95W TDP on the former and the promise of up to 4x more performance-per-watt and 2x less power usage on the latter will surely make the most pessimistic hopeful.
AMD are launching a dual Fury X card in the fall and it'll most likely launch at 1500$ if Nvidia try to counter it with a dual GPU it'll most likely be 3000$ like the Titan Z which the R9 295X2 used to run circles around for half the price. It will either launch with a 140mm or 240mm radiator which is a good thing, especially after witnessing the excellent heat dissipation on the Fury X, a 275W card using a 120mm radiator, albeit a thick one.
In case of the dual GPU and regular CF, the VRAM will be mirrored not pooled, so as normal, unless you're running a DX12 game, as DX12 allows the pooling of VRAM, so Fury X CF will have 8GB of HBM, how cool is that ? and talking about DX12, AMD cards run substantially better in DX12 application, up to 500% better comared to only 300% for Nvidia cards. Will this be translated into more performance in-game ? One can only hope.