AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB GPU Launches Globally For $549, Targets NVIDIA RTX 4070

AMD has finally announced the global availability of its Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU which comes at a price point of $549 US, making it a very compelling option in the high-end category against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU was first launched in China last year as a DIY and SI SKU. It was also released for the European market but was only limited to System Integrators at first but saw a gradual release in the DIY segment through certain AIB partners. Today, AMD is announcing the global availability of this SKU with a new pricing of $549 US.

As for the specifications, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards are going to feature a cut-down Navi 31 GPU with 80 RDNA 3 compute units or 5120 stream processors which is slightly cut-down versus the 7900 XT with 84 compute units or 5376 stream processors along with a slimmed-down memory configuration of 256-bit along with the aforementioned 16 GB memory. Since Infinity Cache is tied to the bus interface within each of the six MCDs, here we can expect 64 MB of IFC which is 26 MB lower than the RX 7900 XT.

Clocks for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE are maintained at a boost clock of up to 2245 MHz but an ironically low base frequency of just 1270 MHz, a 730 MHz reduction over the XT variant. The G6 memory operates at 18 Gbps speeds, delivering 576 GB/s of bandwidth versus the 20 Gbps pin speeds on the higher-end XT & XTX variants.

As for availability and pricing, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU will come at $549 US with retail availability starting tomorrow on the 27th of February. In terms of performance, the graphics card will be positioned against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU which also has an MSRP of $549 but is seen selling around the $500 US mark. All major AIB partners which include ACER, ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX will have custom variants available. ACER and ASUS will have their variants available by March.

According to the official AMD slides the RX 7900 GRE offers a 14% better value in terms of performance versus the RTX 4070 but in actual independent tests, the RX 7900 GRE ends up around 3-8% faster than the RTX 4070 while the 4070 takes a lead in RT titles.

Then there's the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER which retails for $50 US more and offers substantially better performance. The advantage of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is still a higher 16 GB VRAM since the both 4070 & 4070 SUPER cards come packed with 12 GB VRAM. One of the biggest advantages of such high memory pools is that it can lead to much better AI performance in workloads such as LLMs. Furthermore, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU is already supported in the ROCM 6.0 ecosystem making it a very viable AI option.

Overall, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU is a great option in the high-end segment, and if you are from Camp Red, it is an option worth considering.