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The AMD RX 7900 GRE isn't a new GPU, per se, as it was previously available in China. A few people might have even acquired a card and had it shipped to a different region, but in general it was difficult to find the 7900 GRE outside of Asia... until the past month, when the 7900 GRE started popping up in Europe. And now the card has officially released in the U.S. and other regions with a $549 MSRP.
It's not massively different in terms of performance from the RX 7800 XT, and there's a good chance the worldwide launch was simply delayed while AMD and its partners tried to clear out existing RX 6000-series inventory. With the previous generation Navi 21 GPUs mostly gone now, there's room for the RX 7900 GRE — and a good thing, too, as AMD's lineup wasn't doing so well against Nvidia's post-Super RTX 40-series competition.
AMD has set its sights for the RX 7900 GRE on Nvidia's RTX 4070, which now starts at $549 officially, with the cheapest models selling for $529. If you only care about rasterization gaming performance, it's an easy win for Team Red: The 7900 GRE beats the RTX 4070 by 11~18 percent at ultra settings in our test suite. However, if you're also interested in trying out ray tracing games, or in artificial intelligence workloads — including DLSS — Nvidia continues to offer strong competition overall. Both cards can handle rasterization gaming at up to 4K, but AMD's card can struggle badly with heavier ray tracing games.
Ultimately, the RX 7900 GRE offers a good value. It's equal to or faster than any of the previous generation cards, up to and including the RX 6950 XT, uses less power than those older GPUs, and costs less as well. You also get new features like AV1 encoding support, DisplayPort 2.1 outputs (which would require a recent monitor purchase to be meaningful), and improved AI hardware acceleration.
AMD's RDNA 3 architecture has been a bit of a mixed bag and a big departure from what we saw with RDNA 2. There are plenty of enhancements, but much like Nvidia's Ada Lovelace GPUs, pricing and product naming conventions have changed quite a bit. AMD's top Navi 21 GPU was used on the RX 6950 XT, 6900 XT, 6800 XT, and the vanilla 6800. At launch, Navi 31 was only used with the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, with a rather large step down to Navi 32 and the RX 7800 XT. Now the 7900 GRE steps in to fill some of that gap.
Given GPU chiplets were supposed to reduce costs and make AMD more competitive, this first generation hasn't exactly revolutionized anything. But then we could say the same for AMD's Zen 2 CPU architecture. CPU chiplets really came into their own with Zen 3 and now Zen 4. Perhaps the future RDNA 4 and RDNA 5 GPUs will prove that chiplets can do more than just reduce costs.
The RX 7900 GRE priced at $549 represents basically linear scaling in price for performance on AMD's product stack. It nominally costs 10% more than the RX 7800 XT, and it's about 10% faster. Considering the cost of the rest of a PC gaming build, spending $50 more to potentially improve performance by 10% should be no-brainer if you want to pick up a fast AMD GPU, though such thinking also opens the doors to spending $400 more to get up to 40% performance if you want to start down that path.
For anyone looking to buy a good high-end AMD GPU, the RX 7900 GRE definitely warrants a look. It's a potentially better balance of price and performance than the other 7900 cards (if you're only looking at the cost of upgrading a GPU), and gives the same features. It doesn't come away with a landslide victory, but it didn't really need to.
The Sapphire Pulse model we received for review is particularly impressive in the area of noise, barely registering above the ambient noise level. We gave the overall score a half-star bump because of the Sapphire design and execution. Those who like quite PCs will find a lot to like with this particular card.
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