AMD back in the big league. GPU architectures tend to run like London buses - you rarely see a new one and then, quite unexpectedly, two come along at once. Curiously and interestingly, Nvidia and AMD debut their premium graphics GPU architectures within a month of one another. Thinking about buying a really good graphics card right now? Read away.

Let's make something clear at the very outset of this review. The two GPU heavyweights have decided to use a different tack towards solving the problem of gaming at high resolutions. These decisions are actually made some time in the past, often years ago, so what you see today is the engineering teams' design ethos back in 2012 or so.

Nvidia teases out iterative gains from the energy-efficient Maxwell architecture and relies on pushing considerable throughput on a 250W design. AMD, on the other hand, refines its GCN architecture and, instead, puts more focus on the memory side of things. We know all about Nvidia's efforts from looking at the impressive numbers posted by the GeForce GTX Titan X and, more recently, GTX 980 Ti, so let's examine how AMD goes about letting loose a behemoth of a GPU: enter the Fiji-infused Radeon R9 Fury X.