Reviews are finally coming in for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE, a Chinese version of a popular AMD graphics card, and it looks like it's actually a great card.
The RX 7900 GRE is designed to reside between Radeon 7800XT and the Radeon 7900XT as the third model of AMD's largest Navi 31 GPU that uses the RDNA 3 architecture, according to the Tom's Hardware Review. This is a big improvement over the 7800
Its starting price is $549, which puts it right in the mid-range market alongside Nvidia RTX 4070 Super and the baseline NVIDIA RTX 4070. A smart idea, considering that AMD could easily compete with Nvidia and earn a place among the best graphics cards. And from what we see of its specs and performance, it matches well or even outperforms similar cards on the market that are priced similarly or higher.
The RX 7900 GRE was originally launched only in China, but has since had a slow rollout to the rest of the world. As of February 26, 2024, it was officially available in the US for a retail price of $549. It was originally planned to be released only in China, but AMD decided to bring the graphics card to the global market due to the “panorama changing competitiveness of the GPU market.
Why did AMD wait for a global launch?
Objectively, it's a good decision for AMD to bring the Radeon RX 7900 GRE to a global market, especially considering the lack of affordable mid-range graphics cards in this generation. But why did AMD wait so long to launch it outside of China in the first place?
When the RX 7900 GRE was first released, there were plenty of other mid-range options like the RX 6950 XT, 6900 XT, and 6800 XT. But as declining inventory left open space on retail store shelves, the opportunity opened up for the 7900 GRE to replace them, especially since it fits right between the 7800 XT and 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 perform comparably is quite an achievement. Regardless of the wait, it's great to see that we can benefit from having another great mid-range option.
