Review AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE review: the lowest binned Navi 31 variant is now globally available, starting at $549

[Admin]

The AMD RX 7900 GRE breaks its region-locked chains, arriving globally with a $549 MSRP. Our testing shows that performance falls between the existing 7900 XT and 7800 XT, with a price closer to the former, fleshing out AMD's high-end graphics card offerings.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE review: the lowest binned Navi 31 variant is now globally available, starting at $549 : Read more

 

[Notton]

So it falls directly between a 7800XT and 7900XT, and should have been called the 7900.

It looks really good as a 1440p card.
It's not that interesting, considering it's price tag.
I'll wait to see what the RTX 5000 and RX 8000 series brings to the table, unless my 1070Ti croaks first.

 

[Giroro]

I'm surprised they didn't completely rebrand the card for the west. More generally, I'm surprised they're releasing it in the west at all.
10% more performance for 10% more money isn't exciting, it's pointless. If they feel the need to release a minor stop-gap card, then I think they won't be ready to release anything truly exciting anytime soon. Maybe the AI surge has made them go back to the drawing board with RDNA 4.

It's hard to explain, but In my mind, something about calling it "Golden Rabbit" severely devalues it. So I imagine they at least will never spell out that acronym. Gold isn't valuable or aspirational; it's always cheap, fake, and tacky.
Also, I don't associate rabbits with being fast - I associate them with the weak fluffy bunnies that keep tearing up my yard.

Calling it golden means its a knockoff. It makes me think the GPU is actually some ancient Radeon HD 7970 chip that somebody is fraudulently trying to pass off as a counterfeit RX 7900 on Temu for $80 - or that it might have a virus or set my computer on fire.
Maybe I just buy too much counterfeit garbage from overseas.

 

[UnforcedERROR]

The conversation at $550 right now is almost specifically 1440p raster, which the 7900 GRE performs handily in. At these prices, 16 GB vs 12 GB for the 4070 is the biggest argument in its favor. Neither card is competent in Ray Tracing at 1440p, and the price-to-performance difference isn't enough to argue much otherwise, so it's mostly about longevity.

As others said, it's not terribly interesting, and it feels like a notably late arrival, but it's something I suppose. I still feel like the $500 - $700 segment of cards is wholly disappointing from both NVidia and AMD.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

So it’s basically similar performance to a 6900xt or a 6950xt it sounds like? I’m happy with my 6800xt for now that I got under $450 new. I’ll hold onto that a while.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

Hmm... I don't find it particularly exciting, but I don't have anything to complain about either. AMD had to do something to counter Nvidia's 4070 Super (and non-Super price drop), and this does it.

What I'm really excited about, is where the 7800XT goes from here. I don't imagine it's going to stay at $500. If it drops to $450, that would be an extremely compelling option, and probably the best value of this generation.

As always, props to Jarred for the fabulous review! : )

 

[thestryker]

Seems like decent enough perf/$, but doesn't really bring anything new to the table as expected. Not needing a video card has been a great place to be this generation as we're just now seeing some decent values though still limited to >$400.

Per TPU the VRAM is limited to 2316mhz which caps the potential memory bandwidth at ~593 GB/s. The power limits on the card are at least standard so if anyone wants to try their hand at getting higher boost clock it is possible.

 

[ingtar33]

this is basically just going to fill in the hole the 6900xt left in the market when it's stock ran out, they are both priced about the same, both perform about the same.

It's not bad. the performance difference from the 7800xt to the 7900xt was pretty big (as was the $$ difference), this will slide right in between them at the old 6900xt price. It's a solid buy i think. I mean as solid as today's prices get.

everything is still overpriced.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

this is basically just going to fill in the hole the 6900xt left in the market when it's stock ran out, they are both priced about the same, both perform about the same.

It's not bad. the performance difference from the 7800xt to the 7900xt was pretty big (as was the $$ difference), this will slide right in between them at the old 6900xt price. It's a solid buy i think. I mean as solid as today's prices get.

everything is still overpriced.

I do wish AMD hadn't lowered the VRAM speed from 20 Gbps. That probably would have given it another ~5% in performance, which would have been good. Right now, it's between the 7800 XT and 7900 XT, but slightly closer to the former. It makes sense from a pricing perspective, but even a few percent more overall performance would have been nice.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Like all AMD cards for the last couple of generations, it's good, but it's just priced way too close to nVidia to be a true competitor, and this is no exception. At 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 the 4070 Super was effectively equal in terms of rasterization and superior with ray tracing, and it's only as little as $50 more expensive. How is AMD going to persuade all of the lifelong nVidia users and people like me who have had multiple negative experiences with Radeon cards to jump from Team Green over $50?

And once third party custom models are included that price will exceed the 4070 Super, making the 7900 GRE a non starter.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Like all AMD cards for the last couple of generations, it's good, but it's just priced way too close to nVidia to be a true competitor, and this is no exception. At 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 the 4070 Super was effectively equal in terms of rasterization and superior with ray tracing, and it's only as little as $50 more expensive. How is AMD going to persuade all of the lifelong nVidia users and people like me who have had multiple negative experiences with Radeon cards to jump from Team Green over $50?

And once third party custom models are included that price will exceed the 4070 Super, making the 7900 GRE a non starter.

The good time to buy will be sales maybe around Black Friday imo. Now granted my 6800xt was last generation when I bought it this past December. On the other hand, $439 was a deal for a card that is essentially equivalent to a 7800xt.

As someone above said if they’d put the 7800xt at $450, or even $475 then it goes on sale, that would be a decent price to performance imo.

 

[tommtajlor]

So it’s basically similar performance to a 6900xt or a 6950xt it sounds like? I’m happy with my 6800xt for now that I got under $450 new. I’ll hold onto that a while.

You nailed it. It is exactly between those two. My friend has one for several month now (EU you could bought it even as a standalone product ). It is bandwith starved. 18gbit/s and 256bit bus just kills it. Would they give it 20gbit/s it could be on par at least with the 6950xt.

 

[baboma]

>Like all AMD cards for the last couple of generations, it's good, but it's just priced way too close to nVidia to be a true competitor, and this is no exception.

Putting myself in AMD's shoes, I'd do the same thing.

With AI the main focus--more precisely, the focus of investors' valuation of stock price--and with consumer GPUs not being a growth market, AMD would want to expend the least amount of resources on the latter while not losing market share. Maintaining the same price/perf with the competition is an efficient way to do that.

Lowering MSRP (not street price) relative to the competition is always a bad idea for the vendor, as it impacts the brand. You (the vendor) don't want your brand to be viewed as the "cheaper alternative." You can let street price fluctuate using promos and sales--which we've seen happen--but the official MSRP should be comparable to the competition. As the saying goes, once you lower the price, it's hard to raise it back up again.

Secondly, maintaining a marginal "value" improvement for this gen has a benefit in that you (vendor) don't have to do as much work to improve upon it for the next gen. Slow-walking the rate of perf boost is good, given that most of your resources are on AI. To add appeal, you can add features in lieu of more perf. We've seen that with various AI enhancements (frame-gen, upscaling, etc).

My takeaway as a consumer is that we can expect the same (low) price/perf growth for the next gen of consumer GPUs. FPS perf will be stagnant or marginally rise for next gen, while there will be substantial jump for AI features & perf.

 

[umeng2002_2]

Should have renamed it the Chocolate Rabbit Edition for America.

 

[Amdlova]

See lots of reviews... like the 7800XT smell like a 7800XT. Don't sell in China trow in America.
Dear AMD for that price any day I will get a Nvidia 4070 super
Greed Race Eastern world

 

[The TrippyHippie]

If I had the money the RTX4070 is nice card also does not pull much power but the 16GB ram would win me over thats worth more and more useful than better raytracing to me.

 

[artk2219]

Given how similar those specs are to the 7900XT, i wonder how those future overclocking tests are going to go. If you could get it to similar clock speed to the others, that should get you some decent extra performance over the 7800XT.

 

[ocer9999]

I think it's a decent card, considering the bigger GPU vs the 7800XT, it should be better future proof as well handle higher details.
I would probably go with the PowerColor Hellhound, from other tests it looks that the Hellhound performs even better than Sapphire Nitro+! Which is actually a very impressive achievement.

 

[targetdrone]

Silly me just bought a 7800xt 2 weeks ago to replace a 2070 Super.
I would have waited and went with this if I knew it was going to be a thing.

 

[Atomic Skull]

If you are running SD on AMD hardware and aren't using Linux and ROCm you are doing it wrong. It's way, way faster than DirectML.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

If you are running SD on AMD hardware and aren't using Linux and ROCm you are doing it wrong. It's way, way faster than DirectML.

Prove it. This should be easy if it's as fast as you say. All you need to do is a batch of 24 images at 512x512 or 768x768, with 50 iterations. The prompt is "messy room" and CFG is 7.0, using Euler Ancestral, with SD1.5 model. Use whatever batch size and batch count gives optimal throughput.

Time how long it takes to generate all 24 images, than convert that to images per minute. (Divide 1440 seconds by the time taken to get images per minute.) I suspect you'll find that the final results between DirectML and ROCm aren't wildly different on RDNA 3 GPUs. DirectML is the recommended path in AMD's reviewers guide, FWIW, and given the current numbers there's little reason to assume AMD's GPUs would suddenly become significantly faster.

Right now, an RTX 4090 is about triple the throughput as an RX 7900 XTX. That's 330 TFLOPS of FP16 (dense) versus 123 TFLOPS of FP16. Assuming full optimization for both architectures, you'd expect a 2.7X advantage for Nvidia — and if the models benefit from sparsity, up to double the figure. So really, a 2.74X advantage for Nvidia (based on my testing at 768x768) is almost exactly in line with expectations. The 2.86X advantage at 512x512 isn't that much greater.