If you don't know, AMD announced a tremendous lost last month, with its quarterly earnings recording right around $942 million. The company, which is used to well over $1 billion per quarter, seemed to suffer so much due to drop in PC sales, as well as CPU/APU sales. But AMD isn't going anywhere. As PC gaming is been becoming trendier thanks to better graphics, upping the stakes might end up being the company's saving grace. So, AMD put out a new powerhouse of a GPU that sports, get ready, 4K gaming. The Radeon R9 Fury X from AMD was revealed at the end of June, and has since been getting some seriously mixed reviews regarding its 4K game play. Looks like living up to 4K isn't an easy upgrade.

It does, however, take its place as the company's fastest video card, and best gaming upgrade the company has to offer so far. Despite only having 4GB of VRAM memory, it's being put to good use as it contains AMD's new High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on-die, running 512GB/sec. The rest is based on AMD's Fiji architecture, meaning an 8.9 billion transistor, 596 square millimeter chip on a 28nm process (Ars Technica).

Here is where the mixed reviews come in. It looks like the R9 Fury X dipped below ideal frame speeds for gaming, coming very short of 4K. Since its release, several sources conclude the same problem during their performance analysis. It just doesn't look good enough. Instead, the R9 Fury X seems to be something more along the lines of a 1440p game experience (Hard OCP). When comparing to its direct competitor, Nvidia's GTX 980 Ti, the Fury X only had a minuscule (about 7 percent) amount of favored performance.

What a bummer. But what about Engadget, who reports the card shining with promise when testing the 4K out on both The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Batman: Arkham Knight? While they looked great, they tended to look even smoother in 1080p; and at times when the games dipped below 30 frames per second, it made it hard to want to spend $649 on a video card.

So while this is kind of a bummer, and I could go on about how every reviewer justifies what they liked or didn't like, the general consensus is out there. At this point, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”. 4K isn't really necessary for great PC gaming, so why upgrade your card to something that will only disappoint you? Just take Engadget's advice and try getting the highest frame rate you can with lower resolution.