So AMD has decided to release the Radeon RX 7900 GRE globally starting Feb 27th at the price of $549. The GRE model, also known as the Golden Rabbit Edition was supposedly exclusive for the China market last year to compete against the GeForce RTX 4070.
However, NVIDIA has already replaced it with the RTX 4070 SUPER and it’s the year of the dragon now, so AMD’s global release for Radeon RX 7900 GRE is somewhat awkward at this point. Still, we compared it against both RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER just to find out what this card is capable of.
Overview
This is the Sapphire Pulse RX 7900 GRE, one of the custom models you can get from the board partners. While the box design is mostly similar to the existing Pulse series cards and the cooler design is almost identical to the higher-end RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, it was a product targeted at the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER this time.
AMD recommends a 700W power supply for this model and it has a rated TBP of 260W. You can still power the card with a 650W power supply as long as you know what you’re doing. The card still uses 2 x PCIe 8-pin connectors, of course, which makes it compatible with older power supplies, unlike the 12VHWPR header which NVIDIA now enforces on its newer GPUs.
As for the display output options, it has 2 x DP and 2 x HDMI, which can be very useful to users who need more than one HDMI port for their system.
System Specs
Our games benchmark test focused on various AAA titles, running them at their maximum settings using the following list of hardware under an ambient temperature of 28°C:
| CPU | Intel Core i9-12900K |
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX |
| Memory | Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6000 CL30 (16GB x2) |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 FE / NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER FE / Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 GRE |
| Power Supply | Cooler Master M2000 Platinum |
| Primary Storage | Kingston KC3000 2TB |
| CPU Cooler | Cooler MasterLiquid PL360 Flux |
| Chassis | Cooler Master MasterFrame 700 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro 64-bit 22H2 |
Games Benchmark – Raster Performance
While the RX 7900 GRE was intended for 1440P gaming according to AMD, it is capable of 4K gaming and it’s able to achieve more than 60fps on the majority of the titles we have tested, except for those very demanding titles like Alan Wake 2, and Cyberpunk 2077. In Watch Dogs Legion, the high memory capacity helps a lot and we can see a very decent 72fps average and 62fps 1% low, easily beating the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER.
Scaling down to 1440p, despite all the cards tested being able to easily achieve more than 80fps in all of the titles tested, the RX 7900 GRE can be seen performing better than both NVIDIA counterparts most of the time. It is about 8-10% better than the RTX 4070 SUPER in terms of performance.
We can see similar patterns in 1080p as well but the performance difference between the 7900 GRE and 4070 SUPER is slightly higher this time, averaging at 13-15% in the titles tested.
Games Benchmark – Ray Tracing
Moving on to the ray tracing performance, it is almost certain that NVIDIA is going to have an upper hand in this test, what we have done here is to show how taxing some titles can be even though they’re all equipped with the ray tracing feature alongside FSR. For titles with FSR3, we’ll leave that out for now as we only wanted to see the raw ray tracing performance.
At 4K resolution, we struggle with Cyberpunk in areas with denser populations and during fights, meanwhile, Alan Wake 2 is pretty much unplayable with the ray tracing set to highest. The rest of the titles tested are still somewhat playable, much to our surprise.
The overall situation gets much better as we scale down to 1440p, as most of the titles are playable with 60fps+ now, except for Alan Wake 2 which gives us an average of 43fps and some random lags as we navigate through the environment.
All the titles are very playable at 1080p but the overall visual experience will not be as good as what you’ll get on higher resolution.
So, is that it for AMD? Well, not quite. Despture that is perfect to begin with but both sides, be it NVIDIA or AMD, are working on improving the feature and hopefully, reducing the occurrence of the artifacts that many of us saw in some of these artificially generated frames.
If the game that you’re playing has the featurite not having as many titles that support frame-gen as what we can see on the GeForce cards, we can see more titles with FSR3 support is on its way, which is benefiting not only Radeon cards but also older GeForce cards that don’t get the DLSS 3 frame-gen feature.
Although I can still see people talking about frame-gen being the ‘fake’ performance boost, there are also people who started to accept the idea of having these artificially generated frames to boost the overall performance. It is never a feae and you can enable it, just give it a try first and judge later.
Thermals & Power Draw
And here comes the part that might concern some users, the power draw and thermals. Unsurprisingly, the higher-performance RX 7900 GRE has a higher recorded power draw than both the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER, which is at 200W and 220W respectively.
As for thermals, the Sapphire Pulse RX 7900 GRE is definitely on the higher side. With GPU load temperature peaked at 78C, alongside the memory junction and hotspot temperature peaked at 96C and 89C respectively, you might want to consider increasing the fan curve to improve the cooling performance.
Final Thoughts
From the test results, ray tracing performance is something the RX 7900 GRE still lacks when compared to the RTX 4070 but the situation is slowly improving right now. The raster performance is pretty okay in general and you can still take advantage of FSR3 for a quick performance boost without having to enable ray tracing at all.
Like it or not, ray tracing is here to stay but at least things are looking better for AMD with FSR3, notably AFMF which puts Radeon cards in a much better position when competing against GeForce cards. However that only applies to titles that have the feature supported as not every game has it, especially older titles that only have DLSS.
So, is the RX 7900 GRE worth getting? For the price of $549, it’s not a bad price but I believe there will be users who are willing to spend that $50 more to get an RTX 4070 SUPER for DLSS3 and better ray tracing performance. If you’re mainly looking for the best raster performance for the money you’re paying (which I think a lot of people still do) or maybe, are okay with enabling AFMF for the extra performance gain, the RX 7900 GRE is something you can still look into.