China-Exclusive AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE Goes Global
China-Exclusive AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE Goes Global
China often gets regional exclusive silicon for various reasons, with one example being Intel’s Black Edition CPUs, such as the Core i7-14790F and Core i5-14490F. AMD, meanwhile, has its graphics cards bound for the Chinese market, in the form of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. While it has been a Chinese-exclusive card, the GPU is set to launch tomorrow globally.
This cut-down Navi 31 GPU was released in China last July, and the name initially suggested it was indeed a Chinese exclusive, as “GRE” stands for Golden Rabbit Edition, given that 2023 was the Year of the Rabbit. However, with competition from NVIDIA looming, it looks like Team Red decided to switch up its product strategy to respond.
The 7900 GRE is the answer to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070, a highly efficient GPU that holds its own in the 1440p segment and roughly equaled the performance of RTX 3080 Ti. It comes with just four fewer Compute Units over the 7900 XT (84 vs 80), though the clock speed is reduced somewhat, with the TBP significantly reduced from 315W to just 260W – in fact, it uses less power than the 263W Radeon RX 7800 XT. It also sports 16GB of VRAM – a 4GB reduction from the XT, as well as reduced memory bandwidth due to a narrower 256-bit memory bus.
For the pricing, AMD says the Radeon RX 7900 GRE will cost $549, which undercuts the RTX 4070 with its $599 MSRP. This is only a $50 bump over the MSRP of RX 7800 XT (and a whole $200 cheaper than RX 7900 XT). While the performance expectations are mostly known by now as outlets previously obtained a unit from China for testing purposes, the reviews released today are more or less a courtesy for the global launch.
Pokdepinion: This could be the most price-competitive RDNA3 GPU to date.
