A year with the Fury pro
I've now had my card for a year and in my opinion as a daily gamer it has been a good year.
I got my Fury Tri-x at the beginning of August 2015, At the time I did a
series of gaming benches to compare the Fury against my outgoing MSI 290x Gaming.
One year on I'm going to redo the same tests to see what today's drivers offer
in comparison.
One of the advantages people claimed for AMD cards is that performance increases over time thanks to driver enhancements so I thought I'd put that claim to the test.
Both sets of results are using the same hardware components along with Windows 10 pro.
A 4790k, 8gb's of 2133 ddr3, a 1080p monitor and the drivers stated below.
Drivers:
August 2015: 15.7.1
July 2016: 16.7.2 Crimson
Games:
Tomb Raider 2013 reboot,
August 2015: 78/101/128 min/avg/max
July 2016: 72/102.6/130
Alien Isolation,
August 2015: 127.30/180.57 avg/max
July 2016: 137.97/201.86
Resident evil 6 benchmark,
August 2015: 15876 s score/rank
July 2016: 16214 s
Sleeping dogs (Definitive edition),
August 2015: 43.5/62.3/76.7 min/avg/max
July 2016: 46.9/62.4/72.5
Grid 2,
August 2015: 96.2/119.7/152.8 min/avg/max
July 2016: 91.73/122.14/161.72
Dirt 3,
August 2015: 155.2/198.3 min/avg
July 2016: 158.11/198.95
F1 2012,
August 2015: 107/139 min/avg
July 2016: 114/142
Hitman Absolution,
August 2015: 52/65/80 min/avg/max
July 2016: 50/64/90
Far Cry 2,
August 2015: 118/152/239 min/avg/max
July 2016: 122/159/244
Conclusion:
As you can see there's not really been any performance boost but as these are fairly old games that was to be expected.
They Age Better is more about how the card now compares to the cards Nvidia has run against the Fury over the last year. That is where the improvements can be found and I'm betting it will continue to improve going forward.
Software support:
I've often been a vocal complainer on this forum when I've had reason to be but since
AMD started Crimson the driver support has been excellent.
When there has been an issue the driver team has been quick to respond
and for me personally 2017 has been great as a daily PC gamer.
Living with the card has also been good, It handles temperatures and noise
better than both the MSI 290x gaming and EVGA 780 Classified that I
owned before it.
My model is the Sapphire Fury Tri-x o/c edition and while it tends to be
one of the better if not the best version of the Fury pro (debatably the Nitro now) they all give good temperature and noise results.
I struggle to understand why AMD did not do an air cooled full Fiji card
because going on the results the Fury pro gives it would have been a great card.