Friday, July 28th 2023
AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE Gets Benchmarked
AMD's China exclusive Radeon RX 7900 GRE has been put through its paces by Expreview and the US$740 equivalent card should in short not carry the 7900-series moniker. In most of the tests, the card performs like a Raden RX 6950 XT or worse, with it being beaten by the Radeon RX 6800 XT in 3D Mark Fire Strike, even if it's only by the tiniest amount. Expreview has done a fairly limited comparison, mainly pitching the Radeon RX 7900 GRE against the Radeon RX 7900 XT and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070, where it loses by a mile towards AMD's higher-end GPU, which by no means was unexpected as this is a lower tier product.
However, when it comes the GeForce RTX 4070, AMD struggles to keep up at 1080p, where NVIDIA takes home the win in games like The Last of US Part 1 and Diablo 4. In games like F1 22 and Assassin's Creed Hall of Valor, AMD is only ahead by a mere percentage point or less. Once ray tracing is enabled, AMD only wins in F1 22 and it's by less than one percent again and Far Cry 6, where AMD is almost three percent faster. Moving up in resolution, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE ends up being a clear winner, most likely partially due to having 16 GB of VRAM and at 1440p the GeForce RTX 4070 also falls behind in most of the ray traced game tests, if only just in most of them. At 4K the NVIDIA card can no longer keep up, but the Radeon RX 7900 GRE isn't really a 4K champion either, dropping under 60 FPS in more resource heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us Part 1. Considering the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti only costs around US$50 more, it seems like it would be the better choice, despite having less VRAM. AMD appears to have pulled an NVIDIA with this card, which at least performance wise, seems to belong in the Radeon RX 7800 segment. The benchmark figures also suggests that the actual Radeon RX 7800 cards won't be worth the wait, unless AMD prices them very competitively.
Update 11:45 UTC: [Editor's note: The official MSRP from AMD appears to be US$649 for this card, which is more reasonable, but the performance still places this in in a category lower than the model name suggests.]
Source:
Expreview
However, when it comes the GeForce RTX 4070, AMD struggles to keep up at 1080p, where NVIDIA takes home the win in games like The Last of US Part 1 and Diablo 4. In games like F1 22 and Assassin's Creed Hall of Valor, AMD is only ahead by a mere percentage point or less. Once ray tracing is enabled, AMD only wins in F1 22 and it's by less than one percent again and Far Cry 6, where AMD is almost three percent faster. Moving up in resolution, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE ends up being a clear winner, most likely partially due to having 16 GB of VRAM and at 1440p the GeForce RTX 4070 also falls behind in most of the ray traced game tests, if only just in most of them. At 4K the NVIDIA card can no longer keep up, but the Radeon RX 7900 GRE isn't really a 4K champion either, dropping under 60 FPS in more resource heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us Part 1. Considering the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti only costs around US$50 more, it seems like it would be the better choice, despite having less VRAM. AMD appears to have pulled an NVIDIA with this card, which at least performance wise, seems to belong in the Radeon RX 7800 segment. The benchmark figures also suggests that the actual Radeon RX 7800 cards won't be worth the wait, unless AMD prices them very competitively.
Update 11:45 UTC: [Editor's note: The official MSRP from AMD appears to be US$649 for this card, which is more reasonable, but the performance still places this in in a category lower than the model name suggests.]
66 Comments on AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE Gets Benchmarked
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?generation=Radeon%20R400%20PCIe&sort=name
What a woeful update RDNA3 has turned out to be IMO. Oh well Battlemage better offer some competition next year or we are all screwed.
While not ideal at $650 (should be $600), this card is much better deal than either the $600 RTX 4070 which it surpasses by a mile (authors own words) and the $800 RTX 4070Ti which it trades blows with in rasterized performance and only 12GBVRAM.
Proportional to the amount of CUs it has the same amount of IC as full Navi31, 1MB per CU
7900 XTX: 96CUs and 96MB IC
7900 GRE: 80CUs and 80MB IC
GRE is just Navi31 with one SE disabled so the backend/frontend supporting the card should be the same proportional to the amount of CUs
GPU core & memory clock speeds slight downgrade is about its about the only reduction that could impact performance scaling
Never mind, im blind apparently as the 7900GRE indeed has only 64MB IC giving it 80% the amount of IC per CU: 0.8MB per CUNo... If you look at the specs its easy to understand why the 7900GRE performance scales badly relative to the number of CUs.
It has only 64MB IC for 80CUs, lower clocked memory chips and GPU clocks
The 7800 will have 64MB IC for 60CUs, same memory clocks to feed less CUs and faster core clocks. 7800 will most likely perform on par with the 6800 XT with a few percentage wins here and there
The card is definitely nothing interesting or exciting, so no surprise that it doesn't launch in all countries.
AMD is focused on the Chinese market, so it will try to adopt a name with Chinese characteristics. "GRE" does not mean Graduate Record Examination, but rather "Golden Rabbit Edition", as this is the Year of the Rabbit in the traditional Chinese calendar. Similarly, AMD used to have the RX 590 GME, which means "Golden Mouse Edition" because 2020 is the Year of the Rat.