"AMD's has told me that extremely limited overclocking of the GRE cards is a bug and it will be addressed shortly," stated Steve Walton in the latest YouTube video.
TechPowerUp noted in its review that the Radeon RX 7900 GRE appears to have an artificial overclocking limit imposed by AMD. The graphics card's memory clock would not surpass 2,316 MHz, while its maximum boost clock can't break the 2,803 MHz barrier. According to AMD's statement to Walton, the limit is a bug, and the chipmaker is already working on a solution.
The Radeon RX 7900 GRE isn't a new graphics card. Initially exclusive to China, the Navi 31 graphics card has been on the market since July 2023. It wasn't until recently that AMD decided to release the graphics card worldwide — it officially launched in the U.S. on February 27, 2024. Having been on the market for so many months, it's curious that we've heard nothing about the bug until now. The good news is that AMD has committed to rolling out a fix to remediate the issue. The chipmaker didn't specify if the fix will come in a driver or firmware update.
The Radeon RX 7900 XT has a 2,000 MHz game clock and a 2,400 MHz boost clock. In contrast, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE has a 1,880 MHz game clock and a 2,245 MHz boost clock. We tested the Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 GRE Pulse with a 1,927 MHz game clock and a 2,293 MHz boost clock. Our results above illustrate how the Radeon RX 7900 XT dramatically exceeds the state boost clock, while the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is much closer, on average, to the rated boost clock.
That suggests that there ought to be quite a bit of overclocking headroom on the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. AMD apparently put a limit on its drivers — why, we couldn't say — which went undiscovered until the worldwide launch this past week. Or perhaps the limit wasn't always in the drivers and is a recent introduction? Either way, manual overclocking could give a sizeable bump to the Radeon RX 7900 GRE's performance.
There's a sizeable gap between the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and Radeon RX 7900 XT right now — up to 15%, depending on the resolution. Removing the artificial overclocking limit on the Radeon RX 7900 GRE won't magically make it perform like a Radeon RX 7900 XT. Still, it should allow end users who want to manually overclock away to narrow the gap. The Radeon RX 7900 XT still has a wider 320-bit memory interface and 20GB of memory, plus higher default clocks, but it should be possible to reduce the margin between a stock XT and an overclocked GRE to perhaps 5~10 percent.
The issue only affects manual overclocking so that it won't benefit the Radeon RX 7900 GRE's out-of-box experience. Factory overclocks are still in place and working correctly. You can't properly redline the 7900 GRE right now, which saddens some enthusiasts. AMD doesn't like sad enthusiasts, so it will now remove the limiter.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
Is there anyone who is still overclocking their video cards though?
Yes. A 5% increase with overclocking equals about 10% with frame generation, DLSS 3. Also, overclocking VRAM tends to smooth out frame variation. It's all very game dependent, but a mild 5 to 10 percent increase through overclocking can help in niche cases, especially when frame generation pretty much doubles that gain.
Nowadays I just buy the fastest card and don't bother to overclock. I can see how people with constrained budget might need to do so to eke out the last bit of performance from what they can afford, but after saving the galaxy from the Reapers I got rich selling them as scrap metal (to the victor go the spoils and all that) so I have cash to spare and don't have to worry about OC.
