If you were waiting for AMD’s new graphics cards to hit store shelves before making a decision between Big Red and Big Green, you don’t have to wait any more. AMD’s (current) top of the line GPU is on sale today in Australia, and it’s (very slightly) cheaper than its competition.
The new, improved, and smaller Radeon R9 Fury X is out in stores today, according to AMD’s local reps. It’s the natural arch-enemy of Nvidia’s $999 GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and it has a price tag to almost match, coming in at a recommended retail price of $979. That’s if you can find one in stock somewhere, and if you can find a store that won’t artificially inflate the price due to contrained supply.
It’s looking like the R9 Fury X will be the first of the new breed of R9 cards using the Fiji graphics chip to be out in Australia. There’s no official pricing or release date yet for the air-cooled R9 Fury variant or the pint-sized R9 Nano, although we’re told that the Fury should be released at least in the US on the 14th of July, so Australia should follow closely behind that. AMD’s chief gaming scientist (what a cool job title) Richard Huddy has said that both the Nano and the dual-GPU variant of the Fury — likely to destroy entire planets with sheer gaming power just like the previous-gen Radeon R9 295×2 — will be out before the end of the year.
Have you seen one of AMD’s new graphics cards on sale in Australia? Let us know in the comments below, and feel free to link to the store you found it at if it’s online. We’ll have a R9 Fury X in the office to test next week, so stay tuned to find out how it performs up against the best of the best from Nvidia and to see what advantages a smaller, water-cooled card can bring to your gaming PC.
Update: first Fury X listing I’ve seen has been for MSI’s third-party Fury X card at GameDude… at a $1099 RRP though. Eep. [AMD]