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Reviews are finally coming in for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE, a Chinese version of a popular AMD graphics card, and it seems that it’s actually a great card.
The RX 7900 GRE is made to reside in between the Radeon 7800 XT and the Radeon 7900 XT as the third model of AMD’s largest Navi 31 GPU using the RDNA 3 architecture, according to the Tom’s Hardware review. It’s a far improvement from the 7800 XT, as it has 60 compute units (CUs) while the 7900 GRE has 80 CUs, which is a 33% increase.
Its starting price is $549, which puts it right in the midrange market next to Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super and the baseline Nvidia RTX 4070. A smart idea, considering that AMD could easily compete with Nvidia and gain a place among the best graphics cards. And from what we see of its specs and performance, it matches well or even exceeds similar cards in the market that are priced around the same or higher.
Originally the RX 7900 GRE was launched in China only, but since then has had a slow release throughout the rest of the world. As of February 26, 2024, it has officially been made available in the US for a retail price of $549. Originally, it was slated for a Chinese-only release, but AMD decided to bring the graphics card to the global market due to the “changing competitive landscape of the GPU market.”
Why did AMD wait for a global release?
It’s objectively a good call for AMD to bring the Radeon RX 7900 GRE to a global market, especially considering the lack of affordable mid-range graphics cards this generation. But why did AMD wait so long to release it outside China in the first place?
Back when the RX 7900 GRE first launched, there were plenty of other mid-range choices like the RX 6950 XT, 6900 XT, and 6800 XT. But as dwindling inventory left open space on retail shelves, the opportunity opened for the 7900 GRE to replace them, especially as it fits right in between the 7800 XT and the 7900 XT.
Considering how excellent those two cards are, scoring four and a half out of five stars and four out of five stars, respectively, making this card a comparable performer is quite the achievement. Regardless of the wait, it’s great to see that we can benefit from having yet another excellent mid-range option.