Positioning & Architecture
This is our fifth review of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, unfortunately PowerColor's card was shipped after the official AMD launch, so we couldn't feature it on release day. There's one more GRE review in the pipe, for the ASUS TUF. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE has been on the market for quite some time, it was launched in early summer 2023, but only in Asian markets. The "GRE" name stands for "Golden Rabbit Edition," 2023 was the year of the Rabbit in China, where the Rabbit is a symbol of longevity, peace and prosperity. A Gold Rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac is a person who is kind-hearted, conservative and who doesn't like cut-throat competition with others. It's slightly unexpected that AMD is using the GRE naming scheme for a global launch in 2024, which is the year of the Dragon, but on the other hand, it's reasonable, given the fact that the specs are unchanged.

RX 7900 GRE goes up against NVIDIA's RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Super, to create an additional SKU between the $500 RX 7800 XT and the $700 RX 7900 XT. Under the hood, we're getting the Navi 31 graphics processor with 5120 cores enabled, the RX 7900 XT has 5376, or 5% more—not a huge difference. The biggest difference is certainly in the memory bus, which is now 256-bit wide, while the 7900 XT has a 320-bit memory bus. The size of the L3 cache is linked to the memory bus width, because the cache resides in the MCD dies, bringing the L3 cache down to 64 MB, from 80 MB on the XT. The GPU ticks at a rated boost of 2245 MHz (vs 2400 MHz on the XT), the memory is clocked at 2250 MHz, or 250 MHz lower than the XT.

Performance
PowerColor's RX 7900 GRE Hellhound is the "middle" offering, next to the entry-level "Fighter" and the more premium "Red Devil." It still comes with a good cooler and a large factory overclock to a game clock rating of 1972 MHz, which is a 92 MHz increase over the AMD default of 1880 MHz, or +5%. Averaged over our whole benchmark suite at 1440p, the RX 7900 GRE Hellhound is the fastest GRE card we've tested so far, slightly outperforming the RTX 4070 Super in rasterization—a major success. The gap to RTX 4070 Ti is only 4%, and the RTX 4070 Ti Super isn't that far away with +10%. AMD's own Radeon RX 7900 XT is 14% faster and the 7900 XTX is 30% ahead—a very even distribution of performance levels. Compared to last-generation's RX 6900 XT, the RX 7900 GRE offers a 10% performance uplift, and the lead over the RX 7800 XT is +12%. It's impressive to see that the RX 7900 GRE is able to beat last-generation's RTX 3090 flagship—at much more affordable pricing.

FSR, Frame Generation and DLSS
While RX 7900 GRE is fundamentally a card targeted at 1440p gaming where it shines with excellent FPS, it definitely has the horsepower for 4K gaming, too, in many titles, even without upscaling. At 4K maximum settings you'll be quite close to 60 FPS in those games, which means 60+ is in reach with slightly reduced details. Another approach is to enable FSR upscaling, which renders the game at a lower than native resolution and intelligently upscales the image for a minimal loss in image quality. FSR works well and is supported in many games, which makes the technology easy to use. AMD has recently released FSR 3 Frame Generation, which is only available in a few titles so far, but the list will definitely grow in 2024. While AMD's FSR is hardware-agnostic—it works on all GPUs from all vendors—NVIDIA's DLSS requires certain hardware units, which is a strong selling point for NVIDIA. While an NVIDIA card will give you the ability to run all currently available upscalers; DLSS, FSR and XeSS, owning a Radeon card means you won't be able to use upscaling in games that support NVIDIA DLSS exclusively. NVIDIA DLSS 3 is the best frame generation technology available today, is usable combined with native rendering or DLAA (upscaling not required), and is only supported on NVIDIA GeForce 40 series cards. AMD thus developed AFMF, which is a driver-level frame-generation solution that works in nearly all games, but at lower quality, because it doesn't have knowledge of static objects like the HUD and text overlays, to exclude those from frame generation.

VRAM Size
Radeon RX 7900 GRE comes with 16 GB VRAM, which is the right size for this segment in my opinion, because it's a little bit more future-proof than the 12 GB VRAM that NVIDIA is giving us on the RTX 4070, 4070 Ti and 4070 Super. While 12 GB is perfectly sufficient for all the game tests in this review at 1440p, I feel like future games could end up being slightly more demanding—not a lot though. More VRAM will not magically make all your games run faster, it only helps in those games that run out of VRAM. No doubt, there are some cases at 4K where 12 GB VRAM will become a bottleneck, especially with ray tracing turned on, but the performance won't be high enough regardless of 12 GB or 16 GB, which means you'll have to use upscaling or reduced details anyway, which lower VRAM usage accordingly. VRAM size is not only about how much memory is available, but also how it's connected. Due to the way AMD designed their GPU architecture, the VRAM size = number of memory chips also affects the bus width, which drives memory bandwidth. Since the L3 cache of the GPU is located in the MCD tiles, these VRAM choices also affect how much L3 cache is available to store data locally inside the GPU, so a costly data transfer to the memory chips can be avoided for highly popular data. At the end of the day, this doesn't matter as much, because the 12 GB RTX 4070 Ti is still faster than the 16 GB RX 7900 GRE—in all metrics, raster-only, ray tracing, minimum FPS—simply because it has more rendering units available to crunch the numbers.

Ray Tracing
As expected, ray tracing runs a bit slower on the RX 7900 GRE than on competing NVIDIA cards, because the dedicated RT units in NVIDIA cards are more powerful, so fewer tasks are offloaded to the GPU shaders. That doesn't mean that RT is unusable on the GRE, it's just running a bit slower. At 1440p, AMD's card sits roughly between the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070. Given the fidelity of ray tracing effects in today's games and the fact that they will not deliver a game-changing experience, I think that's not an unreasonable compromise. If you're betting on ray tracing on the other hand, then the similarly priced RTX 4070 Super is certainly a more powerful choice, offering around 25% better RT performance.

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
PowerColor's RX 7900 GRE Hellhound comes with a much better cooling solution than all the other RX 7900 GRE cards that we've tested so far. Our apples-to-apples noise-normalized cooler comparison test confirms that at the same heat load and noise level, the Hellhound is between 8 °C and 13 °C cooler than competing models from Sapphire and ASRock—a big difference. Temperatures are fantastic, reaching just 59 °C at full load. What makes this even more impressive is that the card is running whisper-quiet in this state. Just 25 dBA is virtually inaudible, especially when the card is installed in a case with other actively cooled components. Remember, this is full gaming load, not idle! These are impressive numbers and PowerColor has got one more ace up their sleeve. Thanks to the card's dual BIOS capability, you may activate a "quiet" BIOS, which runs the card at even lower fan speeds and slightly reduced power limit. Now the card emits just 23 dBA under full load, which is virtually inaudible—on an open bench, in a quiet room with all other noise sources turned off—great job, PowerColor! If you want a GRE with a good cooler and a quiet BIOS that offers meaningful choices, then the Hellhound is the card for you. As expected for a modern graphics card in 2024, the fans will stop spinning when not gaming, for the perfect noise-free experience.

Power Consumption
With a gaming power consumption of 290 W, the Hellhound is a bit more power-hungry than other GRE cards, which usually run at around 250 to 270 W, only the Sapphire Nitro+ is higher, reaching almost 300 W. You do get some extra performance in return from the factory OC. NVIDIA's RTX 4070 and 4070 Super draw a bit less power with 201 W and 218 W respectively, which is quite a big difference in terms of percentages. For a hardcore gamer the power bill difference might matter, but for most other scenarios it won't be a driving factor, certainly not for PSU sizing. Looking at efficiency, which considers both power draw and FPS achieved, the RX 7900 GRE definitely falls behind the other RX 7900 series models, and the Hellhound is even behind the RX 7800 XT in that metric, due to its higher power draw which doesn't result in as many gained FPS. Our media playback power consumption testing shows extremely high power usage in this specific scenario, which looks like a driver bug—both the RX 7900 XT and XTX run at lower power levels—surprising that AMD is still having issues with that.

Overclocking
Overclocking worked very well on our card, we gained almost 15% in real-life performance, which is much more than we usually see. At launch, AMD's drivers limited memory overclocking greatly, because the maximum possible value was set to 2316 MHz. Following some drama online, AMD declared that the memory clock limit is a bug and will be fixed in the future. With the 24.3.1 WHQL drivers AMD has implemented this as a driver workaround that raises the 2316 MHz limit that's defined in the BIOS to 3000 MHz. In our testing we reached 2614 MHz memory, which is a significant increase over the original 2316 MHz value (+12.9%), or 16.2% over the default memory frequency—this turned into an additional 4.5 FPS in real-life performance. Thank you, AMD, for fixing this.

Pricing & Alternatives
The Radeon RX 7900 GRE is widely available and in-stock everywhere, starting at AMD's MSRP of $550. At this price point the card is competitively priced. It's slightly more expensive than the RTX 4070 non-Super ($525), but more affordable than the RTX 4070 Super ($590), yet the GRE achieves better raster-only performance than both these models and is quite close to the RTX 4070 Ti non-Super ($720). At the same time AMD's card offers 16 GB VRAM, while all these NVIDIA cards offer only 12 GB. AMD does fall back in ray tracing performance though, and power consumption/efficiency is worse, so the lower pricing is reasonable. PowerColor's Hellhound is listed online for $580, a $30 increase over the AMD MSRP. Acceptable, considering the fantastic cooler, paired with perfect noise settings, and the Hellhound gives you the best cooling solution of all GRE cards that we've tested so far. Sapphire's Pulse is a strong competitor, because it's priced at $550, and still comes with a small factory OC. The Pulse's noise levels are excellent, too, but temperatures are considerably higher than the Hellhound, and there's no RGB lighting—I can still see a lot of people opting for it, due to the lower pricing. If you're looking for a fully-featured GRE though, and/or want the lowest noise possible, then the Hellhound is a fantastic choice. The biggest selling point for NVIDIA is DLSS 3 Frame Generation support and I can definitely understand people who are willing to spend more to have DLSS + higher RT FPS even if it means slightly lower raster perf and smaller VRAM. AMD's own RX 7800 XT ($500) is an interesting alternative to the 7900 GRE, especially for gamers who are fully focused on 1440p—you sacrifice 10% performance, but can save 10% in cost, too, lowering the cost-of-entry. Still, AMD's pricing for the GRE is not low enough to make the card fly off the shelves, even though it's a good offering, maybe another $10 or $20 would help, but the price aligns with AMD's recent strategy. Unless you can find them at greatly reduced pricing, I don't think last-generation cards are viable alternatives. It looks like this segment will see some more pricing action, soon, because I'm sure NVIDIA will respond to the global release of the RX 7900 GRE.