The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE originally launched exclusively in China, but the GPU giant just announced that it’ll release worldwide for $549. Better still, it apparently outperforms the RTX 4070, and there’s a good chance it’ll actually end up becoming my favorite affordable 4K GPU as a result.
At this point, it feels like there’s a GPU for everyone roaming around the best graphics card battlefield. At the start of the generation, both the main players did focus solely on having a dance off at the premium party, with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 catering to beyond enthusiast levels of performance and the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX playing the role of a traditional flagship card. However, the red team’s next release proves that the year ahead is going to be about valve, and that’s fantastic news for those of you hoping to enjoy 4K PC visuals for a reasonable price.
In terms of specs, the RX 7900 GRE comes armed with a Navi 31 and 16GB GDDR6 VRAM, meaning it’s sort of a mix between the Radeon RX 7900 XT and newer RX 7800 XT. However, despite using the same RDNA 3 chip as the flagship, it’s 2,245MHz boost clock speed and slower memory mean it’s ultimately gunning for the mid-range crown.
Despite numerous references to the card being a mid-range rival, including in-house 1440p benchmarks, AMD does suggest the RX 7900 GRE is also a 4K GPU. I’d prefer to get my hands on one for testing before committing to that idea, but I reckon that it could pull off some impressive UHD tricks with some settings tweaks. Not to mention that it has access to HYPR-RX, consisting of both FSR 3.0 upscaling and Frame Generation tech.
I’m not saying the RX 7900 GRE will serve as a fully fledged 4K graphics card, nor do I think it’ll trump something like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super. That said, I do think for many players, it will provide just enough oomph and upscaling tricks to become a UHD option, and for $540, it's arguably better value than the rest of the upper mid-range crowd.
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