AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE review: the lowest binned Navi 31 variant is now globally available, starting at $549

Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 GRE Pulse

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The AMD RX 7900 GRE cards all come via third-party add-in board (AIB) partners. AMD sent us a Sapphire Pulse model for our initial review, which has a $549 MSRP. Sapphire also makes a 7900 GRE Pure priced at $579 and a 7900 GRE Nitro+ that costs $599, with RGB lighting and a modest factory overclock in both cases, plus a few other extras.

The Sapphire 7900 GRE Pulse represents the reference models, then, and most other $549 priced cards should perform similarly — though cooling and noise levels can still vary quite a bit. This is a 321x127x51 mm card, with a 2.5-slot width. It weighs 1100g (2.425 lbs), so its reasonably sized compared to contemporary triple-fan alternatives.

As with other Sapphire 7000-series GPUs that we've looked at, the fans are equipped with Sapphire's newer 'angular velocity' fan blades and tare 95mm in diameter. We've found these fans to be very good at producing plenty of airflow without making a lot of noise and expect good results from this card as well.

Nearly every current AMD GPU from the RX 7700 XT through the RX 7900 XTX that we've tested in the past year or so comes with dual 8-pin power connectors — or triple connectors like on the RX 7900 XTX Nitro+ Vapor-X. A single 8-pin paired with a 6-pin connector should also be possible, but these days it's simply easier to use 8-pin connectors everywhere. Or at least, that's our assumption. The two connectors can provide up to 300W of power, meaning the PCIe slot shouldn't have to help out much.

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Sapphire Pulse brand is their baseline offering, so it doesn't come with a lot of extras. The 7900 GRE Pulse doesn't have any RGB lighting — a plus for some, a con for others — nor does it offer a dual-BIOS switch. The higher tier Pure and Nitro+ brands deliver those extras, if you're interested, and also come with a modest factory overclock.

As we saw with the Sapphire RX 7600 XT, Sapphire includes dual HDMI 2.1 ports and dual DisplayPort 2.1 54Gbps ports. For the many users who will only connect one or two monitors, we like this arrangement since you can use two of the same port type. It shouldn't matter too much, and you can still run up to four monitors off the card should you choose — and assuming you have the desk or wall space.

The only 'extra' you get with the 7900 GRE Pulse is a support bracket. This isn't one of the truly chunky cards that we've seen, but it still weighs enough that having additional support for the back of the card (i.e. the opposite end from the video ports) isn't a bad idea. Sapphire's support bracket is a bit clunkier to install compared to a kickstand, but at the same time it screws into the case and thus won't slide around if you move your PC.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE Test Setup

Our current graphics card testbed has been in use for over a year now, and so far we haven't seen any pressing need to upgrade. The Core i9-13900K is still holding its own, and while the i9-14900K or Ryzen 9 7950X3D can improve performance slightly, at higher resolutions and settings we're still almost entirely GPU limited — though perhaps not when the future RTX 50-series and RX 8000-series arrive. We also conduct professional and AI benchmarks on our Core i9-12900K PC, which is also used for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

Note that, due to the 13900K crashing issues — which were affecting certain games until I changed BIOS settings — we have retested all of the cards for this particular review. We'll be working through other GPUs in the coming weeks as well, and most of the changes aren't too significant, but if you compare numbers with previous reviews you may see a few differences.

We're using 24.2.1 preview drivers from AMD for this review, on all of the included cards. The public version of the driver we're using should go live on AMD today. As for Nvidia GPUs, we're running the 551-series drivers — we started with 521.23, then the 4080 Super was tested with the 531.31 launch drivers, and now we've shifted to the 551.61 drivers that came out last week.

Our current test suite consists of 15 primary games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six games. The remaining nine games are tested in pure rasterization mode. We also have four newer 'bonus' titles that aren't included in the main charts, two of which use DXR and two of which are rasterization games. While many games in our test suite support upscaling, we're mostly skipping that due to time constraints, though we will enable FSR2/3 or DLSS Quality mode upscaling in two of the bonus games.

We test at 1080p (medium and ultra), 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra for most of our reviews — ultra being the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). The RX 7900 GRE straddles the line between the 7900 XT and the 7800 XT, which means it can usually run 4K at acceptable levels, particularly with upscaling. However, the most demanding games may require either lowering the resolution, or higher levels of upscaling — or both, if the game has path tracing.

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to fully experience the higher frame rates that might be available. G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate. As we're not testing with esports games, most of our performance results are nowhere near the 240 Hz limit, or even the 144 Hz limit of our secondary test PC.

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We've installed Windows 11 22H2 and used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future. We've also used Winaero Tweaker to disable Windows Update and some other elements. Basically, we're doing our best to lock down our PC and prevent OS updates, as much as possible.

Our test PC includes Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on our page on power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional content creation application tests, and we also ran some Stable Diffusion benchmarks to see how AI workloads scale on the various GPUs.

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