The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE launched globally and is a great pickup at $549

Image of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE.

What you need to know

• The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) launches on February 27th. 
• The card features 80 RDNA 3 compute units and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory.  
• The Radeon RX 7900 GRE is releasing below price expectations at $549 to compete with NVIDIA's 4070 and 4070 Super options. 

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Team Red (AMD) punches back after the recent successful launch of NVIDIA's Super line of GPUs for its 40 series of cards. The resounding response around the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is that it's a great card for an unbeatable price. It's quite impressive to see these specs in a card for $549 when I just bought the NVIDIA 4070 Super FE for $599 and it only comes with 12 GB of RAM. 

Let's take a look at what comes with the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and if it's worth picking up on day one. 

Is the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE good? 

AMD has done superbly this generation to compete with NVIDIA on power and price.  (Image credit: AMD)

While we have yet to get our hands on a review unit here at Windows Central, the consensus online seems to be that the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is the best RDNA 3 GPU ever as far as performance for the price. The price also came in under what was expected compared to the cost of the card in its previous markets. 

While the 7900 GRE is not as powerful as the 7900 XT, it's not that far behind especially considering the price. It also has a lower power consumption than the 7900 XT with the new graphics card rated for a 260W TGP. Here is a list of the specifications for the new-to-the-west GPU.

• Compute Units - 80
• Boost Frequency - Up to 2245 MHz
• Game Frequency - 1880 MHz
• Ray Accelerators - 80
• AI Accelerators - 160
• Peak Half Precision Compute Performance - 92 TFLOPs
• Peak Single Precision Compute Performance - 46 TFLOPs
• Stream Processors - 5120
• Transistor Count - 54 B
• AMD Infinity Cache Technology - 64 MB
• Memory Speed - Up to 18 Gbps
• Max Memory Size - 16 GB
• Memory Type - GDDR6
• Memory Interface - 256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth - Up to 576 GB/s
• Effective Memory Bandwidth - Up to 2250
• DisplayPort - 2.1
• HDMI - 2.1
• USB Type-C - Yes

How does the RX 7900 GRE perform?

According to reports from awesome outlets like Gamers Nexus, the RX 7900 GRE from Sapphire that they were testing seems to be outperforming both the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Super in a lot of games when Ray Tracing is off. Once Ray Tracing is enabled though the AMD card seems to lag behind. Give their video a watch for a full breakdown and keep your eyes peeled here at Windows Central for our review in the future. 

Just to give a few benchmark results from the above Gamers Nexus video, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE was able to achieve an average of 91 FPS in Starfield at 1440p, 156.8 FPS at 1440p in Resident Evil 4, and even 106 FPS in GTA 5 at 4K resolution. If you're looking to play your library of AAA games in 1440p at 60 FPS or higher, this card should be able to do that for you.

That being said, in the Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing tests, the RX 7900 GRE doesn't hold up as well. At 1080p medium settings with Ray Tracing enabled in Cyberpunk 2077, the RX 7900 GRE was only able to average 57 FPS. So be aware if you want to push the best visual fidelity, you're better off going with an RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090.

Should you buy an AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE?

Gamers Nexus benchmarks showed the RX 7900 GRE getting an average of 91 FPS in Starfield at 1440p. (Image credit: Gamers Nexus)

Honestly, if you're in the market for a new GPU and ray tracing isn't a super big factor in your gaming experience, this is one of the best cards you can pick up in the $500 range. I have a 4070 Super FE and while it does everything I need it to, the 12GB of RAM might end up being a limiting factor in a couple of years as games get more VRAM-dependent. 

"The Radeon™ RX 7900 GRE graphics card is ready to render the games of today and tomorrow at max settings with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Featuring 80 unified AMD RDNA 3 compute units, harness the power of advanced AI technology and raytracing accelerators to enable an incredible gaming and streaming experience at 1440p and 4K," says AMD's website. 

I have several friends that have the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and absolutely love it, and while the 7900 GRE isn't as powerful as the 7900 XT it's also $150 cheaper but should still perform amazing in most games at 1440p. 

I don't see any negatives or cons with the RX 7900 GRE and based on all of the reviews online, it should be a great pick-up that will be viable for years to come.