AMD's second graphics card based on its 28 nm "Fiji" silicon, the Radeon R9 Fury, will be an important SKU for the company. Ahead of its rumored mid-July launch, TweakTown got a whiff of its specifications from its sources. According to them, AMD will create the R9 Fury by enabling 56 of the 64 compute units on the silicon, yielding 3,584 stream processors. This sets the TMU count at 224. We doubt AMD will tinker with the render back-ends, and so the ROP count could remain at 64. The memory configuration could remain untouched, at 4 GB of 4096-bit HBM.

The clocks speeds on the R9 Fury will be the same as the R9 Fury X, at 1050 MHz core, and 500 MHz (512 GB/s) memory. One should expect temperatures of the R9 Fury to be higher, since it's being designed for air-cooled cards, although it's not expected to cross 75°C in typical gaming scenarios. Looking at the 12.5% drop in stream processors, one could expect the performance gap between the two Fury SKUs to be around 10-12%. This makes the R9 Fury a competitor to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980, if it's priced in its neighborhood (± $50).

ASUS is reportedly giving final touches to an air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury (that's Fury without the "X") graphics card, based on its new-generation STRIX cooling solution. Listings of the card appeared online, with German retailer Computer PC Shop asking 623.90€ (including VAT) for it. If you remove the 19% VAT, you arrive at a price-tag of around 500€. This card is known to feature ASUS' DirectCU III triple-fan cooling solution, which made its debut with the R9 390X and GTX 980 Ti STRIX graphics cards. As for the SKU itself, the specs of the R9 Fury remain a mystery. AMD could lower the clocks, reduce the stream processor count, or a combination or the two. It still features 4 GB of HBM. Evidently, AMD allows its AIB partners to come up with custom-design boards for this SKU, which means a reference-design board is unlikely.

AMD's upcoming $650 Radeon R9 Fury X could have what it takes to beat NVIDIA's $999 GeForce GTX Titan X, while the $550 Radeon Fury (non-X) performs close to the $650 GeForce GTX 980 Ti, according to leaked 3DMark 11 and 3DMark (2013) benches by Korean tech publication ITCM.co.kr. The benches see the R9 Fury X score higher than the GTX Titan X in all three tests, while the R9 Fury is almost as fast as the GTX 980 Ti. The cards maintain their winning streak over NVIDIA even with memory-intensive tests such as 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra (4K), but buckle with 5K. These two cards, which are bound for the market within the next 30 days, were tested alongside the R9 390X, which is not too far behind the GTX 980, in the same graphs. The R9 Nano, however, isn't circulated among industry partners, yet. It could still launch in Summer 2015.