AMD has announced that it’s officially bringing a former Chinese exclusive GPU, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) to the international market, including the US and Europe, in a bid to fight off the Nvidia RTX 4070. What’s more, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE price is $549, matching the cost of the RTX 4070, and it has 4GB more VRAM at its disposal than the Nvidia GPU.
In terms of specs, the new AMD GPU is otherwise much closer to the Radeon RX 7900 XT than the RX 7800 XT below it, with the latter having a well-earned space on our best graphics card guide. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE has 80 compute units enabled, which gives it 5,120 stream processors – this isn’t far off the 5,376 stream processors in the RX 7900 XT, and it’s a lot more than the 3,840 in the 7800 XT.
In general terms, more stream processors mean more power for running games at higher frame rates, as all these little processors work in parallel together. That setup also means you get 80 of AMD’s RDNA 3 RT cores (or ray accelerators, using the AMD lingo) for realistic lighting and reflections with ray tracing enabled.
What the RX 7900 GRE does have in common with the 7800 XT, however, is its VRAM capacity. Both GPUs have 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, connected to a 256-bit bus. Comparatively, the RX 7900 XT has 20GB of VRAM and a 320-bit bus, but 16GB should be fine for all the RX 7900 GRE’s target scenario, which AMD describes as “high fps 1440p gaming”.
The move follows several weeks of speculation about the Radeon RX 7900 GRE coming to a wider audience, with the GPU being spotted earlier in February 2024 at a UK retailer. Several people have called for the GPU to get a wider release, with PC hardware YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (above) describing it as “the best RDNA 3 GPU,” but lamenting that “you can’t really buy it.”
In terms of standard gaming performance, we expect the Radeon RX 7900 GRE will give the RTX 4070 a bit of a kicking when it comes to rasterization. However, Nvidia also has the benefit of superior ray tracing performance from its Ada architecture, as well as wide support for its DLSS 3 frame generation tech, plus its DLSS Super Resolution upscaler, to improve performance. Comparatively, FSR 3 frame generation is only supported in a handful of games, and Starfield FSR 3 visual quality has been shown to be lacking.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE release date
The worldwide AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE release date is Tuesday, February 27, 2024, following its exclusive release in China on July 28, 2023.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE price
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE price is $549, which matches the price of the Nvidia RTX 4070, and means this GPU only costs $50 more than the Radeon RX 7800 XT.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE specs
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE specs list is much closer to that of the RX 7900 XT than the RX 7800 XT. It has 16GB of VRAM, rather than the 20GB found on the RX 7900 XT, but its 5,120 stream processors and 80 RT cores give it a lot more GPU power than the RX 7800 XT below it.
| RX 7900 XT | RX 7900 GRE | RX 7800 XT | |
| Stream processors | 5,376 | 5,120 | 3,840 |
| Compute units | 84 | 80 | 60 |
| RT cores | 84 | 80 | 60 |
| AI accelerators | 168 | 160 | 120 |
| Game clock | 2,000MHz | 1,880MHz | 2,124MHz |
| Boost clock | 2,400MHz | 2,245MHz | 2,430MHz |
| Memory | 20GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Memory speed | 20Gbps | 18Gbps | 19.5Gbps |
| Memory bus | 320-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Infinity Cache | 80MB | 64MB | 64MB |
| Total board power | 315W | 260W | 263W |
Several graphics card makers have been announced as board partners for the worldwide launch, including Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire, PowerColor, and XFX, and we’ll be sharing our own performance numbers as soon as we’ve tested a card ourselves.
If you’re planning to build a gaming PC, make sure you also read our GeForce RTX 4070 Super review, where we put Nvidia’s new $599 contender through its paces.