For today's launch we're covering four Radeon RX 7900 GRE models: ASRock RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend, Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Nitro+, Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pulse, Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pure. We also have an ASUS card coming, but it was shipped out too late to make it for today's reviews.

Positioning & Architecture
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, 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 320-bit. 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
Averaged over our whole benchmark suite at 1440p, the RX 7900 GRE reaches rasterization performance levels that slightly outperform the RTX 4070 Super—a major success. The gap to RTX 4070 Ti is only 3%, and the RTX 4070 Ti Super isn't that far away with +9%. AMD's own Radeon RX 7900 XT is 13% faster and the 7900 XTX is 29% ahead—a very even distribution of performance levels. Compared to last-generation's RX 6900 XT, the RX 7900 GRE Nitro+ offers a 10% performance uplift, and the lead over the RX 7800 XT is +14%. It's impressive to see that the Sapphire RX 7900 GRE is able to beat last-generation's RTX 3090 flagship—at much more affordable pricing.

Sapphire's RX 7900 GRE Nitro+ comes with the biggest factory OC of all the cards tested today, to a rated boost of 2391 MHz, which is a 6.5% increase over the AMD baseline of 2245 MHz, this turns into a small 4% performance improvement—not much, but that's how all factory OCs work these days.

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 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
The Nitro+ is Sapphire's most premium variant for the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. It comes with a fantastic-looking triple slot, triple-fan cooling solution that's paired with an amazing RGB setup. Noise levels with the default BIOS are extremely low, and the quiet BIOS is truly whisper-quiet, which is an impressive achievement for a card in this performance class. Temperatures are still excellent, reaching only 68-70°C under full load. Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test confirms that the Nitro+ is the strongest cooler tested today. 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 almost 300 W, the Sapphire Nitro+ is more power-hungry than other cards tested today, which usually run at around 250 to 270 W. 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 Nitro+ is even behind the RX 7800 XT in that metric, due to its higher power draw, which doesn't result in equivalent scaling of 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 quite well on our card, we gained over 8% in real-life performance, which is well above what we usually see, but less than other GRE cards tested today. Sapphire's factory OC eats into OC potential, and maximizes performance out of the box instead. Unfortunately AMD restricted overclocking on their card quite a lot, probably to protect sales of the RX 7900 XT. While NVIDIA doesn't have any artificial limitations for overclockers, AMD keeps limiting the slider lengths for many models, this is not a gamer-friendly approach. For the GRE, both GPU and memory overclocking could definitely go higher based on the results that we've seen in our reviews today.

Pricing & Alternatives
The Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Nitro+ will be available globally tomorrow, for $600. It's slightly more expensive than both the RTX 4070 non-Super ($525) and the RTX 4070 Super ($590), yet the GRE Nitro+ 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 a bit worse, so the lower pricing is reasonable. Sapphire's Nitro+ is priced at $600—a $50 increase over the MSRP. You do get a fantastic cooler that's powerful and extremely quiet, dual BIOS, and RGB lighting, but I still feel that at this price some alternatives are becoming very tempting. Sapphire's own Pulse at $550 is extremely strong competition, too. 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 some performance, but save $100, too, lowering the cost-of-entry. Still, AMD's MSRP 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.