And the Winner is...

There is quite a lot of information to discuss before drawing whatever conclusions. Let's beginning cheque out how the Radeon R9 Fury X Crossfire cards compared to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti SLI cards without whatsoever overclocking.

The average frame rate information saw the Fury 10 cards come up out 4% ahead of the GTX 980 Tis based on the 10 games that we tested at 4K. However, of the games nosotros tested, the Fury 10 combo was faster in only 4 of them and that includes a 1% reward in Battlefield 4.

Where the Fury 10 Crossfire setup won big was in Thief where it was fifty% faster and Full State of war: Attila where it was 36% faster. Removing Thief'southward result sees the Fury X cards losing to the GTX 980 Tis overall by i%.

The games where the margin was 5% or less either way included Metro: Redux, Battlefield 4, Hitman: Absolution (due to a CPU limitation) and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Now for the interesting part, typically we wait Nvidia to have the border when looking at frame time (99th percentile) functioning, just this wasn't the case here. The R9 Fury X Crossfire cards were on average 22% faster when comparing the 99th percentile data.

Again, the Fury X Crossfire cards scored big in Thief and Full State of war: Attila, but were also faster in Battlefield 4, The Witcher and even Metro Redux. There was only one game where the margins were shut either style and that was Hitman, again a game that nosotros suspect was CPU limited.

The frame fourth dimension wins were 50/50, merely where AMD was faster it was a lot faster.

Everything changes when overclocking comes into play. The GTX 980 Ti offers loads of overclocking headroom where as the Radeon R9 Fury X offers almost none.

As a event, when comparing average frame rates once overclocked, the GTX 980 Ti graphics cards became 11% faster on average. Games where the GTX 980 Ti SLI cards were previously slower, such as Battlefield iv and Watch Dogs, now favored the green team.

That isn't entirely surprising as overclocking saw SLI performance boosted by 15% on average, whereas the Crossfire configuration gained just a percentage or two. The frame time information now also favored Nvidia past five%.

When it comes to ability consumption there were times when the R9 Fury X Crossfire system consumed over 700 watts whereas the GTX 980 Ti SLI setup never broke 600 watts, at least before any overclocking took place. That said, even when heavily overclocked, the GTX 980 Ti SLI cards withal consumed considerably less than the Fury Ten Crossfire cards.

If we go back and look at the average frame rate performance of each game while also taking note of the minimum frame rates nosotros run across that the GTX 980 Ti SLI setup delivered very playable performance in seven of the 10 games, the Fury 10 Crossfire cards on the other hand provided what nosotros consider to be very playable functioning in half dozen of the ten games while remaining playable in the rest.

Gamers wanting to play at 4K will be happy with either setup overall, but nosotros experience Nvidia offers a more consistent gaming experience while allowing for an additional 15% performance crash-land through overclocking. Normally we don't place so much emphasis on overclocking, but nosotros feel those seeking an enthusiast multi-GPU setup are probably able and willing to savor the benefits of overclocking.

We'd similar to thank Gainward for providing its GTX 980 Ti graphics cards for this article. The GTX 980 Ti Phoenix "GS" proved to be a strong and reliable overclocker, remaining relatively cool and well-nigh silent under gaming load -- even when the cadre frequency hitting 1349MHz via Boost.