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Gaming at 4K on the RX 7900 GRE can be a bit hit and miss. For most rasterization games, it's totally within reach — and games that support FSR 2/3 upscaling can usually break 60 fps. Dropping from ultra to high settings can also help. But ray tracing games at native 4K with maxed out settings often end up as a slide show and would mostly need Performance mode 4X upscaling to reach decent levels of performance.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 4K Overall Performance
Overall, the 7900 GRE takes a 3% lead over the RTX 4070 at 4K ultra. It's again the usual combination of faster rasterization performance and slower ray tracing results. The 7900 GRE also leads the 7800 XT by 8% overall, with a few games looking as though they're becoming more memory bandwidth constrained while other still look like they like the extra compute offered by the GRE.
Even without ray tracing enabled, some of the games fail to break 60 fps. Most newer games do support upscaling, but in some cases (like A Plague Tale: Requiem) it's only DLSS upscaling. You can enable AMD's driver-level RSR upscaling, but that's a lower quality spatial upscaling solution so it doesn't look as nice as FSR 2/3 temporal upscaling.
AFMF is also potentially worth a shot, or you can just go whole hog on AMD's enhancements and try HYPR-RX, but we've definitely encountered anomalies with certain games when taking that approach.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 4K Rasterization Performance
4K ultra gives the 7900 GRE its largest lead over the RTX 4070, with an 18% performance advantage. The 7900 GRE also averages 65 fps across our test suite while the 4070 sits at 55 fps, and looking at the individual games, there are three instances where the GRE can break 60 while the 4070 comes up short: Borderlands 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Watch Dogs Legion.
Compared to the 7800 XT, the GRE holds on to its 8% overall lead in rasterization performance, but a couple of games are almost tied: Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs Legion. Both showed a bigger delta at 1440p, so they may be a bit more bandwidth hungry rather than wanting more compute.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 4K Ray Tracing Performance
As hinted at above, 4K native rendering with ray tracing generally isn't going to fly on AMD GPUs, particularly not the third string 7900 GRE. Of the six games we tested with, only one (Spider-Man: Miles Morales) averages more than 30 fps, while Metro Exodus Enhanced comes in just shy of that mark.
Nvidia's RTX 4070 also fails to break 30 fps in several games, but it gets there in half of the titles we tested, and it's 20% faster than the GRE overall — without factoring in DLSS. So you give up a bit of "already playable" rasterization performance with Nvidia's card to get "maybe playable" ray tracing results, basically.
Looking at the 7800 XT, there are again several games where the gap between it and the 7900 GRE shrinks quite a bit. Spider-Man, Minecraft, and Metro are all practically a tie between the two cards (less than a 5% difference). If the 7900 GRE had 20 Gbps memory, we suspect it would have maintained 10% or higher performance leads.
AMD RX 7900 GRE 4K Bonus Games
1440p was already a bit of a joke for AMD's GPUs in Alan Wake 2, and 4K isn't even remotely within reach. 4K with 2X upscaling results in single digit performance on the 7900 XT and below, with the 7900 XTX at 12 fps. Nvidia's RTX 4070 isn't playable either, but it does more than double the 7900 GRE performance here.
Things get substantially better in games that don't use path tracing, naturally. Assassin's Creed Mirage runs at a comfortable 69 fps on the 7900 GRE. Curiously, that's just a tad slower than the 7800 XT, which manages 70 fps. The RTX 4070 is also effectively tied with the GRE, with only a 1% difference in performance.
The 7900 GRE also claims a very small lead over the RTX 4070 in Avatar, but they're basically tied in performance. Against the 7800 XT, however, the GRE gets one of its larger wins, leading by 12%.
And The Last of Us continues to strongly favor AMD GPUs, with the GRE beating the RTX 4070 by 16%. It's only slightly faster than the 7800 XT again, with a 6% lead.
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