AMD’s Fastest Radeon Yet, Fury X2 Features Two Full Fledged Fiji XT GPUs And A Terabyte Of Memory Bandwidth

AMD is preparing its fastest graphics card yet, a flagship board code named Gemini with two full fledged Fiji XT GPUs. The new ultra-enthusiast flagship Radeon graphics card is set to replace the current Radeon king of the hill & the holder off the world's fastest graphics card title, the R9 295X2.

The official product name for the dual Fiji XT board code named "Gemini" is still unknown, so we'll be using the "Fury X2" designation to refer to the card in the time being. Fury X2 is set to come out next month.  Some figures in the upper echelon of the game development world such as Johann Andersson, chief architect behind the Frostbite engine, have already received a pre-release sample of the new card to play with.

Dat feeling when your just arrived closed liquid cooling pre-release GPU turns out to not be so closed after all pic.twitter.com/umpVUtdVwc

— Johan Andersson (@repi) November 26, 2015

There have been multiple engineering samples of the card in circulation internally at AMD for more than a month now. AMD engineers have been hard at work optimizing for clock speeds, power and CrossfireX scaling. The specifications for the card have been finalized sometime ago, which we've shared in an exclusive earlier this month. The R9 Fury X2 will be the fourth and last Fiji based graphics card from AMD this year. The card will feature two full fledged Fiji XT GPUs with 4GB of stacked High Bandwidth Memory each, for a total of 8GB of memory and a combined memory bandwidth of one Terabyte per second.

Fury X2, AMD's Most Powerful Graphics Card Yet

We exclusively brought you the specifications for both the R9 Fury X and the R9 Fury prior to their announcement earlier this year with millimetric accuracy, so rest assured that the specs you see here for Gemini is what you'll get. Both Fiji XT GPUs inside the R9 Fury X2 will operate at clock speeds of up to 1000Mhz, the stacked 8GB of HBM VRAM operates at a clock speed of 500Mhz.
Internal documentation states that AMD is targeting an 80% boost in 4K and 2560x1440 gaming performance as compared to a single Fiji XT GPU at the same frequencies. AMD has also set a very aggressive target for frame consistency with net frame variance that's less than 20% with their frame pacing technology.

We've learned that the R9 Fury X2 will not be supported on 32bit Windows operating systems. But think of it this way, if your graphics card has more memory than your entire system, then it's probably a good time to upgrade your operating system.

These seem like mighty impressive figures but as with all multi-GPU graphics cards and configurations, effective multi-GPU scaling is going to be essential in extracting performance out of these solutions. The references to a  performance scaling target of 80% with minimum frame variance in AMD's documentation means that dual GPU graphics card fans can breathe sigh of a relief.

XDMA, The Technology Behind Crossfire's Impressive Scaling

In 2013 AMD introduced a brand new Crossfire hardware implementation by adding a DMA engine to the Crossfire composting block on the GPU die. This was first introduced with the Hawaii GPUs in September of 2013, and each subsequent GPU that AMD introduced also had this technology which AMD dubbed XDMA, short for Crossfire DMA.

AMD RADEON™ R9-­‐290X, ONE BIG DGPU MIKE MANTOR

NEW AMD CROSSFIRE™ TECHNOLOGY -­‐ XDMA
- XDMA is a modern approach to negoIaIng the communicaIon of mulIple GPUs for peak gaming performance with the ultra-­‐high-­‐resoluIon displays of tomorrow.
- Radeon™R9-­‐290X includes a Hardware DMA engine in the AMD CrossFire™ composiIng block
- Designed for AMD Eyefinity and UltraHD resoluIons via DisplayPort™ ‒
- Allows for direct access between GPU display pipelines over PCI Express®
- No external connector required
- CompaIble on AMD Catalyst™ frame pacing technologies
- No performance penalty versus external bridge

The technology enables faster, lower overhead communication between multiple GPUs, this in turn translates to better Crossfire scaling. And that's what we're seeing take effect here. It also enables graphics cards in Crossfire setups to inter-communicate through the PCI Express interface which eliminates the need for a Crossfire bridge. But most importantly is that it enables more effective and efficient multi-GPU scaling. Allowing the performance of Crossfire, TriFire and QuadFire GPU setups to scale significantly better.

We've taken an in-depth look at Crossfire and SLI scaling in a previous article which you should check out if you want to learn more about how this technology can affect your gaming experience as well as reduce frametime variance, which is what causes the perceived micro suttering that gamers sometimes notice from multi-GPU setups.

In closing, you can find all the specifications for the R9 Fury X2 - that we've managed to confirm thus far - as well as the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, R9 Nano and R9 290X below arranged conveniently in table for you to feast your eyes upon. The ~ symbol next to a spec denotes that it's pending confirmation.

AMD Radeon Duo Pro Specifications