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The 1080p testing results aren't quite as important on a $549 graphics card, though native 1080p does work as a pseudo stand-in for how the various games might run with upscaling enabled (minus a bit of performance due to upscaling overhead). We have both ultra and medium quality results, in that order, in the chart galleries below.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 1080p Overall Performance
The RX 7900 GRE falls slightly behind the RTX 4070 in our overall metric at 1080p. They're still basically tied, but AMD's GPU tends to pull ahead once there's more of a strain on raw memory bandwidth thanks to its having more VRAM and a 256-bit interface. The 4070 ends up 1.3% faster at ultra settings and 2.7% faster at medium settings.
AMD's 7900 GRE also loses a bit of its advantage over the 7800 XT at 1080p. Now it's 8.4% faster at ultra, and only 6.5% faster at medium settings. That's partly because CPU bottlenecks start to come into play on several of the games. The same is true for the 7900 XT, as its lead shrinks to 14% at ultra and just 9% at medium compared to the 7900 GRE.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 1080p Rasterization Performance
There are a lot of charts in the above gallery of rasterization results, though the two overall charts are most meaningful in determining how the 7900 GRE stacks up. It leads the RTX 4070 in rasterization performance, but the margins are smaller at 1080p: 11% at ultra settings, and 6% at medium settings. The 4070 Super meanwhile comes in 1.5% ahead of the 7900 GRE at both ultra and medium settings.
Overall, the 7900 GRE averages 144 fps at ultra settings, with Flight Simulator being the only game that fails to break 100 fps — that's a CPU bottleneck, where ultra settings on the 13900K result in a performance limit of around 80~84 fps in our test sequence. Far Cry 6, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Watch Dogs Legion are all bumping into CPU limits as well on the RX 7800 XT and above.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 1080p Ray Tracing Performance
For the ray tracing tests, 1080p makes things more viable on AMD GPUs, and the 7900 GRE averages 69 fps overall at ultra settings, and 99 fps at medium settings. Of course, medium settings with ray tracing doesn't make much sense — downgrading image quality in some ways while taking the performance hit from ray tracing.
One thing about ray tracing games is that compute resources tend to be a bigger factor, while memory bandwidth can at times be less critical. Even with less bandwidth, the 7900 GRE beats the 7800 XT by 10% at both our medium and ultra settings for 1080p DXR testing.
And as expected, the RTX 4070 takes the win over the 7900 GRE in this case: 17% faster at medium settings and 22% faster at ultra settings. The only DXR game in our test suite where the 7900 GRE is able to match the RTX 4070 is Metro Exodus Enhanced, where it's 5% faster at medium settings and also had more consistent minimum fps. In the other five games, the 4070 leads by anywhere from 6% (Bright Memory Infinite) to 60% (Minecraft, of course).
AMD RX 7900 GRE 1080p Bonus Games
Alan Wake 2 with our 'medium' settings proves to be much easier to run than the 'ultra' settings that use path tracing — and of course upscaling helps. The 7900 GRE manages a very playable 58 fps. That plummets to 29 fps with path tracing enabled. The competing RTX 4070 on the other hand gets 70 fps at our medium settings and only drops to 53 fps with path tracing — and DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction also makes it look clearer and better in either case.
The 7900 GRE and RTX 4070 are pretty closely matched in Assassin's Creed Mirage, with AMD's card leading by just three percent at 1080p. And as we've seen elsewhere, it only has a slight lead over the 7800 XT as well. Based on the results, we'd venture to guess that Assassin's Creed Mirage likes more memory bandwidth.
Avatar again favors the RTX 4070 over the 7900 GRE, with Nvidia leading by 6% at ultra settings and 12% at medium settings. Perhaps due to the use of ray tracing effects, it also seems to depend more on compute than memory bandwidth, so the GRE beats the 7800 XT by 10% at ultra settings — but that drops to just 6% at medium.
The Last of Us still favors the GRE by a large margin over the 4070 as well, though this time it's 'only' 17% at ultra settings and 15% at medium. The 7800 XT matches the GRE as well at medium settings, where CPU bottlenecks are coming into play, though the GRE still has a 5% lead at 1080p ultra.
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