Today, we have the latest round of leaks that suggest that AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards, codenamed the "RX 8000-series," might continue to rely on GDDR6 memory modules. According to Kepler on X, the next-generation GPUs from AMD are expected to feature 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, marking the fourth consecutive RDNA architecture to employ this memory standard. While GDDR6 may not offer the same bandwidth capabilities as the newer GDDR7 standard, this decision does not necessarily imply that RDNA 4 GPUs will be slow performers. AMD's choice to stick with GDDR6 is likely driven by factors such as meeting specific memory bandwidth requirements and cost optimization for PCB designs. However, if the rumor of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory proves accurate, it would represent a slight step back from the 18-20 Gbps GDDR6 memory used in AMD's current RDNA 3 offerings, such as the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX GPUs.

AMD's first generation RDNA used GDDR6 with 12-14 Gbps speeds, RDNA 2 came with GDDR6 at 14-18 Gbps, and the current RDNA 3 used 18-20 Gbps GDDR6. Without an increment in memory generation, speeds should stay the same at 18 Gbps. However, it is crucial to remember that leaks should be treated with skepticism, as AMD's final memory choices for RDNA 4 could change before the official launch. The decision to use GDDR6 versus GDDR7 could have significant implications in the upcoming battle between AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel's next-generation GPU architectures. If AMD indeed opts for GDDR6 while NVIDIA pivots to GDDR7 for its "Blackwell" GPUs, it could create a disparity in memory bandwidth performance between the competing products. All three major GPU manufacturers—AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel with its "Battlemage" architecture—are expected to unveil their next-generation offerings in the fall of this year. As we approach these highly anticipated releases, more concrete details on specifications and performance capabilities will emerge, providing a clearer picture of the competitive landscape.

Vastarmor's Radeon RX 7900 XTX Super Alloy custom model was revealed a while back (four months ago according to VideoCardz)—for whatever reason, it has taken a long time for finalized units to reach retail outlets in China. A newly discovered JD.com listing reveals an interesting price point of 6799 RMB (~$940)—given the Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU's age at this point in time, Vastarmor has implemented quite a steep discount over the launch MSRP for Chinese markets (7999 RMB). The premium tier ARGB-appointed "Super Alloy" models sport substantial custom cooling solutions—clearly designed to temper higher boost clocks. VideoCardz has looked at the best Navi 31-based cards on the field: "(Vastarmor's latest) is actually among the fastest models on the market. Currently, the highest boost clock for RX 7900 XTX is 2680 MHz, and it can be found on models like ASRock Taichi, Aqua, PowerColor Liquid Devil, or Sapphire Nitro+."

The RX 7900 XTX Super Alloy is one of the largest high-end gaming graphics cards out there—it is a triple-slot, 330 mm x 134 mm x 69 mm design. Strangely, Vastarmor's reference specced RX 7900 XTX Starry Sky model also sports a similarly-proportioned cooling solution. ZOTAC's Prime Gamer Force (PGF) OC design remains triumphant in terms of stupendous dimensions—check out these digits: 381 mm (L) x 154 mm (W) x 74 mm (D)! ZOTAC PGF cards are Chinese market exclusives—much like Vastarmor's best offerings—only the most hardcore/deep-pocked enthusiasts outside of the PRC will be importing these vast gaming hardware delights.

George Hotz and his startup operation (Tiny Corporation) appeared ready to completely abandon AMD Radeon GPUs last week, after experiencing a period of firmware-related headaches. The original plan involved the development of a pre-orderable $15,000 TinyBox AI compute cluster that housed six XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards, but software/driver issues prompted experimentation via alternative hardware routes. A lot of media coverage has focused on the unusual adoption of consumer-grade GPUs—Tiny Corp.'s struggles with RDNA 3 (rather than CDNA 3) were maneuvered further into public view, after top AMD brass pitched in.

The startup's social media feed is very transparent about showcasing everyday tasks, problem-solving and important decision-making. Several Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 OC cards were purchased and promptly integrated into a colorfully-lit TinyBox prototype, but Hotz & Co. swiftly moved onto Team Green pastures. Tiny Corp. has begrudgingly adopted NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs. Earlier today, it was announced that work on the AMD-based system has resumed—although customers were forewarned about anticipated teething problems. The surprising message arrived in the early hours: "a hard to find 'umr' repo has turned around the feasibility of the AMD TinyBox. It will be a journey, but it gives us an ability to debug. We're going to sell both, red for $15,000 and green for $25,000. When you realize your pre-order you'll choose your color. Website has been updated. If you like to tinker and feel pain, buy red. The driver still crashes the GPU and hangs sometimes, but we can work together to improve it."

George Hotz and his Tiny Corporation colleagues were pinning their hopes on AMD delivering some good news earlier this month. The development of a "TinyBox" AI compute cluster project hit some major roadblocks a couple of weeks ago—at the time, Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware was not gelling with Tiny Corp.'s setup. Hotz expressed "70% confidence" in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware. At the time of writing this has not transpired—this week the Tiny Corp. social media account has, once again, switched to an "all guns blazing" mode. Hotz and Co. have publicly disclosed that they were dabbling with Intel Arc graphics cards, as of a few weeks ago. NVIDIA hardware is another possible route, according to freshly posted open thoughts.

Yesterday, it was confirmed that the young startup organization had paused its utilization of XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards: "the driver is still very unstable, and when it crashes or hangs we have no way of debugging it. We have no way of dumping the state of a GPU. Apparently it isn't just the MES causing these issues, it's also the Command Processor (CP). After seeing how open Tenstorrent is, it's hard to deal with this. With Tenstorrent, I feel confident that if there's an issue, I can debug and fix it. With AMD, I don't." The $15,000 TinyBox system relies on "cheaper" gaming-oriented GPUs, rather than traditional enterprise solutions—this oddball approach has attracted a number of customers, but the latest announcements likely signal another delay. Yesterday's tweet continued to state: "we are exploring Intel, working on adding Level Zero support to tinygrad. We also added a $400 bounty for XMX support. We are also (sadly) exploring a 6x GeForce RTX 4090 GPU box. At least we know the software is good there. We will revisit AMD once we have an open and reproducible build process for the driver and firmware. We are willing to dive really deep into hardware to make it amazing. But without access, we can't."

AMD in a GPUOpen blog post showed off some "super early" performance numbers for a Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU rendering a DirectX 12 workload using Work Graphs, instead of the traditional ExecuteIndirect method. Work Graphs is method by with GPUs enjoy greater autonomy in executing render and general purpose compute workloads, by vastly reducing the role of the CPU in the rendering pipeline. At the ongoing GDC 2024, AMD showed off a performance demo of a DirectX 12 rendering workload that implements Work Graphs, running in sync with Mesh Nodes, a feature that will process draw calls while the rest of the graph is executing. This is compared its render times to the traditional method. The differences are staggering.

It takes the traditional ExecuteIndirect method 64% longer to render a frame compared to Work Graphs, in other words, the new method is 39% faster. This has a direct impact on frame-rates for applications that implement Work Graphs. Although not part of the demo, AMD RDNA 3 also implement a silicon-level acceleration for Multi-draw indirect, another API-level feature that's underutilized. AMD's demo showcases a 3D scene without the HUD UI and skybox, being rendered on a single work graph dispatch. Work Graphs and Mesh Nodes are the next big feature addition to the DirectX 12 API feature-set, which will begin rolling out later this year. Both AMD and NVIDIA have ongoing implementation efforts to implement it.

Lately Tiny Corp. CEO—George Hotz—has used his company's social media account to publicly criticize AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware. The creator of Tinybox, a pre-orderable $15,000 AI compute cluster, has not selected "traditional" hardware for his systems—it is possible that AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerator is quite difficult to acquire, especially for a young startup operation. The decision to utilize gaming-oriented XFX-branded RDNA 3.0 GPUs instead of purpose-built CDNA 3.0 platforms—for local model training and AI inference—is certainly a peculiar one. Hotz and his colleagues have encountered roadblocks in the development of their Tinybox system—recently, public attention was drawn to an "LLVM spilling bug." AMD President/CEO/Chair, Dr. Lisa Su, swiftly stepped in and promised a "good solution." Earlier in the week, Tiny Corp. reported satisfaction with a delivery of fixes—courtesy of Team Red's software engineering department. They also disclosed that they would be discussing matters with AMD directly, regarding the possibility of open-sourcing Radeon GPU MES firmware.

Subsequently, Hotz documented his interactions with Team Red representatives—he expressed 70% confidence in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware in a week's time: "Call went pretty well. We are gating the commitment to 6x Radeon RX 7900 XTX on a public release of a roadmap to get the firmware open source. (and obviously the MLPerf training bug being fixed). We aren't open source purists, it doesn't matter to us if the HDCP stuff is open for example. But we need the scheduler and the memory hierarchy management to be open. This is what it takes to push the performance of neural networks. The Groq 500 T/s mixtral demo should be possible on a tinybox, but it requires god tier software and deep integration with the scheduler. We also advised that the build process for amdgpu-dkms should be more open. While the driver itself is open, we haven't found it easy to rebuild and install. Easy REPL cycle is a key driver for community open source. We want the firmware to be easy to rebuild and install also." Prior to this week's co-operations, Tiny Corp. hinted that it could move on from utilizing Radeon RX 7900 XTX, in favor of Intel Alchemist graphics hardware—if AMD's decision making does not favor them, Hotz & Co. could pivot to builds including Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 16 GB OC cards.

The TinyBox AI server system attracted plenty of media attention last week—its creator, George Hotz, decided to build with AMD RDNA 3.0 GPU hardware rather than the expected/traditional choice of CDNA 3.0. Tiny Corp. is a startup firm dealing in neural network frameworks—they currently "write and maintain tinygrad." Hotz & Co. are in the process of assembling rack-mounted 12U TinyBox systems for customers—an individual server houses an AMD EPYC 7532 processor and six XFX Speedster MERC310 Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. The Tiny Corp. social media account has engaged in numerous NVIDIA vs. AMD AI hardware debates/tirades—Hotz appears to favor the latter, as evidenced in his latest choice of components. ROCm support on Team Red AI Instinct accelerators is fairly mature at this point in time, but a much newer prospect on gaming-oriented graphics cards.

Tiny Corporation's unusual leveraging of Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs in a data center configuration has already hit a developmental roadblock. Yesterday, the company's social media account expressed driver-related frustrations in a public forum: "If AMD open sources their firmware, I'll fix their LLVM spilling bug and write a fuzzer for HSA. Otherwise, it's not worth putting tons of effort into fixing bugs on a platform you don't own." Hotz's latest complaint was taken onboard by AMD's top brass—Dr. Lisa Su responded with the following message: "Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution. Team is on it." Her software engineers—within a few hours—managed to fling out a set of fixes in Tiny Corporation's direction. Hotz appreciated the quick turnaround, and proceeded to run a model without encountering major stability issues: "AMD sent me an updated set of firmware blobs to try. They are responsive, and there have been big strides in the driver in the last year. It will be good! This training run is almost 5 hours in, hasn't crashed yet." Tiny Corp. drummed up speculation about AMD open sourcing GPU MES firmware—Hotz disclosed that he will be talking (on the phone) to Team Red leadership.

Tiny Corp., a neural network framework specialist, has revealed intimate details about the ongoing development and building of its "tinybox" system: "I don't think there's much value in secrecy. We have the parts to build 12 boxes and a case that's pretty close to final. Beating back all the PCI-E AER errors was hard, as anyone knows who has tried to build a system like this. Our BOM cost is around $10k, and we are selling them for $15k. We've put a year of engineering into this, it's a lot harder than it first seemed. You are welcome to believe me or not, but unless you are building in huge quantity, you are getting a great deal for $15k." The startup has taken the unusual step of integrating Team Red's current flagship gaming GPU into its AI-crunching platform. Tiny Corp. founder—George Hotz—has documented his past rejections of NVIDIA AI hardware on social media, but TinyBox will not be running AMD's latest Instinct MI300X accelerators. RDNA 3.0 is seemingly favored over CDNA 3.0—perhaps due to growing industry demand for enterprise-grade GPUs.

The rack-mounted 12U TinyBox build houses an AMD EPYC 7532 processor with 128 GB of system memory. Five 1 TB SN850X SSDs take care of storage duties (4 in raid, 1 for boot), and an unoccupied 16x OCP 3.0 slot is designated for networking tasks Two 1600 W PSUs provide necessary electrical juice. The Tiny Corp. social media picture feed indicates that they have acquired a pile of XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards—six units are hooked up inside of each TinyBox system. Hotz's young startup has ambitious plans: "The system image shipping with the box will be Ubuntu 22.04. It will only include tinygrad out of the box, but PyTorch and JAX support on AMD have come a long way, and your hardware is your hardware. We make money either way, you are welcome to buy it for any purpose. The goal of the tiny corp is to commoditize the petaflop, and we believe tinygrad is the best way to do it. Solving problems in software is cheaper than in hardware. tinygrad will elucidate the deep structure of what neural networks are. We have 583 preorders, and next week we'll place an order for 100 sets of parts. This is $1M in outlay. We will also ship five of the 12 boxes we have to a few early people who I've communicated with. For everyone else, they start shipping in April. The production line started running yesterday."

Bethesda on February 20 released the 1.9.67 path update for Starfield, which adds support for AMD FSR 3.0 performance enhancement, including frame generation. To celebrate this update, the game's developers are giving away an ultra-rare Collector's Edition bundle of Starfield-themed flagship AMD hardware. The bundle includes an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX with a special paint-job; and an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which remains the fastest desktop processor for gaming. The RX 7900 XTX Starfield Collector's Edition card features a special cooler shroud and backplate design with design elements from the game; including some anodized aluminium fins in its heatsink in the game's colors. The Giveaway is open to residents of the US, Canada (excluding Quebec), Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. You don't need to purchase the game or any AMD hardware to be eligible. Simply follow the Starfield Twitter account, and reply to the Giveaway announcement tweet. One winner will be randomly chosen. Find all Giveaway rules here.

New Eiswolf 2 AiO - now also for custom designs of the RX 7900XT/XTX GPUs! Alphacool expands its product range and enables the cooling of AMD's RX 7900XT/XTX graphics cards with the innovative Fullcover GPU AIO water cooler. The enormous waste heat from the new generation of graphics cards is dissipated excellently with these coolers. The very good water flow and the large cooling surface are the result of the particularly filigree fin structure. The jet plate with revised inflow engine also distributes the water perfectly over the cooling fins. The full-surface chrome plating of the cooler not only offers resistant protection against acids, scratches and damage, but also achieves a beautiful homogeneity and exceptional shine. The Aurora design of the cooler impresses with its visually calm and simple design as well as the wonderfully uniform lighting, which is achieved via digitally addressable RGB LEDs.

The expandable Eiswolf 2 delivers an all-round carefree package and ensures that its user can easily access a performance-oriented GPU water cooling system out-of-the-box. Also included are the NexXxos ST30 360 mm radiator, the Rise Aurora 120 mm fans, DC-LT 2 pump and TPV hoses with quick-release coupling.
The Eiswolf 2 AiO - 360 mm for RX 7900XT Reference and RX 7900XTX Merc 310 are now available in the Alphacool online store.

We've known since way back in August 2023, that AMD is rumored to be retreating from the enthusiast graphics segment with its next-generation RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which means that we likely won't see successors to the RX 7900 series squaring off against the upper end of NVIDIA's fastest GeForce RTX "Blackwell" series. What we'll get instead is a product stack closely resembling that of the RX 5000 series RDNA, with its top part providing a highly competitive price-performance mix around the $400-mark. A more recent report by Moore's Law is Dead sheds more light on this part.

Apparently, the top Radeon RX SKU based on the next-gen RDNA4 graphics architecture will offer performance comparable to that of the current RX 7900 XTX, but at less than half its price (around the $400 mark). It is also expected to achieve this performance target using a smaller, simpler silicon, with significantly lower board cost, leading up to its price. What's more, there could be energy efficiency gains made from the switch to a newer 4 nm-class foundry node and the RDNA4 architecture itself; which could achieve its performance target using fewer numbers of compute units than the RX 7900 XTX with its 96.

A somewhat expected result of the November 17th export ban on RTX 4090 GPUs to China has been that AMD's top offerings; recently rumored to soon suffer the same fate, have been selling faster than AMD or its partners can make them. Predicting the worst, some OEMs such as Dell have allegedly already set their own self-imposed restrictions on the export of both Radeon and Instinct cards to China. Meanwhile insiders in board channels have not yet received any official warning that they can no longer sell RX 7900 XTXs or XTs to DIY markets, however vendors and consumers alike sense an oncoming storm and unable to get RTX 4090s are buying up as many of the high end Radeons as they can.

It's said that AMD's production capacity for this surge in sales has been underwhelming, and supply to Chinese board partners has been barely trickling in. This lack of incoming supply of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT, restriction or not, is creating a shortage of cards in China that is expected to impact the remainder of Q4 2023 and much of Q1 2024. With no immediate restrictions expected for AMD's top cards it's possible that they could react and ramp up exports to cover the demand, however that could be risky if AMD is trying to avoid being targeted.

AMD's lineup of Radeon and Instinct GPUs, including the flagship RX 7900 XTX/XT, the professional-grade PRO W7900, and the upcoming Instinct MI300, are facing sales prohibitions in China, according to an alleged sales advisory guide from Dell. This restriction mirrors the earlier ban on NVIDIA's RTX 4090, underscoring the increasing export limitations U.S.-based companies face for high-end semiconductor products that could be repurposed for military and strategic applications. Notably, Dell's report lists several AMD Instinct accelerators, which are integral to data center infrastructure, and Radeon GPUs, which are widely used in PCs, indicating the broad impact of the advisory.

The ban includes discrete GPUs like AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, which, despite their data-center potential, may still be sold under specific "NEC" eligibility. This status allows for continued sales in restricted regions like sales of NVIDIA's RTX 4090. However, the process to secure NEC eligibility is lengthy, potentially leading to supply shortages and increased GPU prices—a trend already observed with the RX 7900 XTX in China, where it's become a high-end alternative in light of the RTX 4090's scarcity and inflated pricing. The Dell sales advisory also lists that sales of the aforementioned products are banned in 22 countries, including Russia, Iran, Iraq, and others listed below.

AMD in its post Q3-2023 financial results call stated that it expects the Instinct MI300X accelerator to be the fastest product in AMD history to rake in $1 billion in sales. This would be the time it took for a product in its lifecycle to register $1 billion in sales. With the MI300 series, the company hopes to finally break into the AI-driven HPC accelerator market that's dominated by NVIDIA, and at scale. This growth is attributable to two distinct factors. The first of which is that NVIDIA is supply bottlenecked, and customers and looking for alternatives, and finally found a suitable one with the MI300 series; and the second is that with the MI300 series, AMD has finally ironed out the software ecosystem backing the hardware that looks incredible on paper.

It's also worth noting here, that AMD is rumored to be sacrificing its market presence in the enthusiast-class gaming GPU segment with its next-generation, with the goal of maximizing its foundry allocation for HPC accelerators such as the MI300X. HPC accelerators are a significantly higher margin class of products than gaming GPUs such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The RX 7900 XTX and its refresh under the RX 7950 series, are not expected to have a successor in the RDNA4 generation. "We now expect datacenter GPU revenue to be approximately $400 million in the fourth quarter and exceed $2 billion in 2024 as revenue ramps throughout the year," said Dr. Lisa Su, CEO AMD, at the company's earnings call with analysts and investors. "This growth would make MI300 the fastest product to ramp to $1 billion in sales in AMD history."

AMD Radeon RX 7900 series enthusiast-segment graphics cards now start at a street price of $719. A PowerColor Radeon RX 7900 XT Hellhound custom-design graphics card is listed on Newegg for $749, with a coupon code that shaves a further $30 off, bringing it down to this new low price. At this price, the RX 7900 XT offers significantly higher performance per Dollar than the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which starts at $799, and is tested to offer around 5% lower performance than the RX 7900 XT.

Meanwhile, prices of AMD's flagship graphics card, the RX 7900 XTX, has been on a downward slope, too, with a PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Red Devil premium custom-design card being listed for as low as $889 with a coupon discount. This would space the RX 7900 XTX at least $200 apart from the cheapest GeForce RTX 4080, which is starting at $1,089.

AMD has updated its Radeon Adrenalin driver with the latest edition, 23.9.2. The newest version brings unified driver support for AMD Radeon RX 7700 and RX 7800, which the previous driver lacked, and there was a separate download for these two SKUs. Besides merging into a single unified driver, the new update brings Lies of P, Party Animals, and The Crew Motorfest game support for AMD Radeon graphics. In this driver release, the AMD Radeon Anti-Lag+ feature is introduced for Starfield, Witcher 3, ELDEN RING, Immortals of Aveum, and an Anti-Lag+ screen overlay for system latency. AMD fixed some issues like application crashing while playing Baldur Gate 3 with Vulkan API on RX 7900 XTX, limited GPU clock tuning on RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, application crash while playing SMITE on RX 7900 XTX, and application crash or driver timeout while playing F1 2023 on RX 7800 XT. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 update yet in this driver release.

You can download the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 23.9.2 Driver here.See the full list of changes below:

AMD partnered with Ubisoft to release a limited edition graphics card themed after "Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora," which releases on December 7, 2023. Based on the reference AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the card features a special color-scheme from the game, but the star attraction here is the card's thermally-reactive paint. At idle temperatures, certain parts of the card appear dark, but come to life as the card heats up when gaming. Besides this, the card has its own set of RGB LED illumination that you can control from AMD Software Adrenalin. We'll find out closer to December if this limited edition card includes a copy of the game.

As a part of its promotional deal with Bethesda for the upcoming Starfield game, AMD has announced a limited edition release of both its Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card and its Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU. The latter is in all fairness a bit dull as far as limited editions go, as the only thing really limited is the packaging the CPU comes in. Despite being a limited production run of only 500 units, AMD didn't bother adding any extra marking on the CPU itself, making it less of a collectors edition than it could've been.

On the other hand, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX Starfield Special Edition gets a custom white shroud with a lot of little quirky bits of text on the card and an overall different feel to it compared to AMD's reference design cards. Again, we're looking at a limited run of 500 cards here too and it's not clear if these will be numbered or not. Neither product will be available to buy though, so the only way to get your hands on one or the other, is to enter one of multiple giveaways that either AMD or its partners will host in the near future. There's a video after the break with more details.

AMD just released a special version of its Adrenalin graphics drivers with specific optimization for "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart." The company's recent 23.7.2 WHQL drivers lacked day-zero optimization for the game, which caused some controversy, especially given that real time ray tracing in the game wouldn't work. The one-off drivers carry the version number 23.10.23.03, and come with optimization for the game. They also address the application crash and driver timeout issues noticed when running the game with ray tracing and DSR enabled. Since these drivers are not a part of the main driver trunk of AMD Software, we will not be hosting them.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.10.23.03 Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Drivers

AMD Radeon RX 6000 and RX 700 series based on RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPU architectures have been benchmarked by folks over at ComputerBase. However, these weren't regular benchmarks of performance but rather power consumption. According to their latest results, they discovered that enabling Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) can lower the power consumption of AMD Radeon cards in idle. Using a 4K display with a 144 Hz refresh rate, ComputerBase benchmarked Radeon RX 6800/6700 XT and RX 7900 XT, both last-generation and current-generation graphics cards. The performance matrix also includes a comparison to Intel Arc A770, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 4080.

Regarding performance figures, the tests compare desktop idle consumption, dual monitor power consumption, window movement, YouTube with SDR at 60 FPS, and YouTube with HDR at 60 FPS, all done on a 4K 144 Hz monitor setup. You can see the comparison below, with the most significant regression in power consumption being Radeon RX 7900 XTX using 81% less power in single and 71% less power in dual monitor setup.

The GPU at the heart of the China-exclusive AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) sparked much curiosity. It is a physically different GPU from the one found in desktop Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. AMD wouldn't go through all that effort designing a whole different GPU just for a limited edition graphics card, which means this silicon could find greater use for the company—for example, this could be the package AMD uses for its upcoming mobile RX 7900 series. AMD wouldn't go through all the effort designing a first-party MBA (made by AMD) PCB for the silicon just for the RX 7900 GRE, and so this PCB, with this particular version of the "Navi 31" silicon, could see a wider global launch, probably as the rumored Radeon RX 7800 XT, or something else (although with a different set of specs from the RX 7900 GRE).

We compared the sizes of the new "Navi 31" package found in the RX 7900 GRE, with those of the regular "Navi 31" powering the RX 7900 XT/XTX, the previous-generation "Navi 21" powering the RX 6900 XT, and the NVIDIA AD103 silicon powering the desktop GeForce RTX 4080. There are some interesting findings. The new smaller "Navi 31" package is visibly smaller than the one powering the RX 7900 XT/XTX. It is a square package, compared to the larger rectangular one, and has a significantly thinner metal reinforcement brace. What's interesting is that the 5 nm GCD is still surrounded by six 6 nm MCDs. We don't know if they've disabled two of the six MCDs, or whether they're dummies. AMD uses dummy chiplets as structural reinforcement in some of its EPYC server processors. The dummies spread some of the mounting pressure applied by the IHS or cooling solution, so the logic behind surrounding the GCD with six of these MCDs could be the same.

AMD's upcoming China-exclusive Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) graphics card is reportedly configured with 80 compute units (CU), and not the previously thought 84, according to a leaked TechPowerUp GPU-Z screenshot. While GPU-Z 2.54.0 isn't fully aware of the RX 7900 GRE, and can get some hard-coded details (such as release dates) wrong, since it has the ability to detect "Navi 31" and the RX 7900 series, it is able to count the compute units.

The screenshot describes the RX 7900 GRE as featuring 80 CU, or 5,120 stream processors—the same count as the previous-gen RX 6900 XT, but based on the newer RDNA3 graphics architecture. Also detected are a TMU count of 320, ROP count of 80 (a vast reduction from the 192 available on the silicon, if true). We've known from older reports that the RX 7900 GRE is configured with a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, holding 16 GB of video memory. What's new is that while the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX use 20 Gbps memory, the RX 7900 GRE is given slower 18 Gbps memory, as detected by GPU-Z. This results in a memory bandwidth of 576 GB/s, a significant reduction from the 960 GB/s enjoyed by the RX 7900 XTX.

Here are some of the first pictures of the Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 GRE, a unique China-specific product that isn't just its own Sapphire custom-design, but also a whole different SKU. We first learned about the existence of the RX 7900 GRE earlier this month, and this would be one of its first custom design implementations. The Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE), is a limited edition SKU of the Radeon RX 7900 series. It's neither the RX 7900 XTX nor the RX 7900 XT, but positioned a notch below the latter. Based on the same "Navi 31" silicon as the two, the RX 7900 GRE is equipped with 84 CU (5,376 stream processors), or the same GCD core-configuration as the RX 7900 XT. It however, gets just 16 GB of memory, across a narrower 256-bit wide memory bus.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE is carved out of the "Navi 31" by disabling two of the six MCDs, which reduces the Infinity Cache size to 64 MB, and the GDDR6 memory bus width to 256-bit. The 5 nm GCD is carried over from the RX 7900 XT—you get 5,376 stream processors, 168 AI accelerators, 84 Ray accelerators, 336 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. It is possible that the Sapphire RX 7900 GRE uses a variation of the company's NITRO+ cooling solution that's similar to the NITRO+ Lite SKUs available in markets outside China. The key difference here is that the cooler lacks a vapor-chamber plate, and instead uses a solid copper base-plate to pull heat from the GPU and memory. AMD needs to fill the vast gap in its product stack between the $250 RX 7600 and the $700+ RX 7900 XT, and SKUs such as the RX 7900 GRE could help it compete better against the likes of the RTX 4070 Ti in competitive markets such as China.

The Alphacool Core GPU Cooler is now also available for RX 7900XTX Red Devil GPU! Alphacool delivers with the new cooler great performance, usual high quality and a functional design. The eye-catcher of the copper cooler is the unit of connector terminal and cooler, which is milled from a single piece of copper. The excellent workmanship paired with the hard and resistant chrome plating of the entire copper cooler meet the highest quality standards. The brass G1/4" threads, which are left in chrome and integrated on both sides, are a key design element of the new Core series. They stand out visually very nicely from the terminal.

The aluminium backplate, which is adapted to the design, forms an ensemble together with the terminal and convinces with a clear and homogeneous appearance on the back of the cooler. The individually controllable lighting consists of digitally addressable RGB LEDs and enables uniform and dazzlingly coloured illumination of the entire cooler.

Graphics card prices on a much-needed downward spiral, and this doesn't spare even the enthusiast class of graphics cards. The AMD flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX is available for as low as $799 with retailer promotions. Specifically, an ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Phantom Gaming graphics card is listed on Newegg for $899, with a coupon shaving off a further $100. That's a 30% departure from the $999 MSRP of AMD for the RX 7900 XTX.

At $799, the RX 7900 XTX applies pressure on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, as the RX 7900 XTX can now be had at its MSRP. The RX 7900 XTX is on average 31% faster than the RTX 4070 Ti at 4K Ultra HD in our testing (the intended use-case of the RX 7900 XTX), and about 21% faster than the RTX 4070 Ti at 1440p (intended use-case of the RTX 4070 Ti). The RTX 4070 Ti is about 4% to 9% faster at real-time ray tracing.