Video Card Review: GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs. Radeon R9 Fury X

Introduction

We tested two of the most high-end video cards available today: the GeForce GTX 980 Ti from NVIDIA, and the Radeon R9 Fury X from AMD. Which one will deliver more performance in games? Check it out!
The GeForce GTX 980 Ti and the Radeon R9 Fury X are direct competitors, since they have the same price at about $650 USD. While the Radeon R9 Fury X (along with the R9 Nano) is now AMD’s most high-end video card, NVIDIA has the GeForce GTX Titan X (which we already tested) that targets the ultra-enthusiast market as it’s more expensive than the GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
You can see the tested video cards in Figures 1 and 2. They are both reference models from the chip manufacturers.

Figure 1: the GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Figure 2: the Radeon R9 Fury X

Figure 3 shows both video cards side by side, without their coolers.

Figure 3: both the video cards, without the coolers (Radeon R9 Fury X on top and the GeForce GTX 980 Ti on bottom)

In the table below, we compare the main specs from the video cards we included in this review. Prices were researched at Newegg.com for this article.

Video card	Core clock	Turbo clock	Effective memory clock	Memory bus	Memory bandwidth	Memory	Processing cores	TDP	DirectX	Price
GeForce GTX 980 Ti	1,000 MHz	1,075 MHz	7 GHz	384 bit	336 GiB/s	6 GiB GDDR5	2,816	250 W	12.1	USD 650
Radeon R9 Fury X	1,050 MHz	–	1 GHz	4.096 bit	512 GiB/s	4 GiB HBM	4,096	275 W	12	USD 650

Now let’s take a closer look to the tested video cards.