AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE review: the most compelling RDNA 3 graphics card yet

On the face of it, the RX 7900 GRE slots into the existing stack and fills a useful gap - until this GPU arrived, there was no direct competitor for the RTX 4070 Super. Strategically, it's a good idea from AMD because put simply, clearly there is a market for $600 GPUs with good levels of performance. It may sound unbelievable but Nvidia's RTX 4070 - which launched at $600 - is the most popular RTX 40-series desktop GPU on the Steam Hardware Survey. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense for AMD to position its own offering at the same price-point.

While the RX 7900 GRE may not actually be anything new as such, the package delivered by AMD here is terrific - and that's all down to the price-point. At $550, it's actually delivering more value overall than the RX 7800 XT, which has already received nigh-on universal praise for its value proposition. The GRE follows the same template, taken up another notch. It can't match Nvidia's features or RT performance (though there are some very close results vs RTX 4070 in some titles), but it can deliver more rasterisation performance and more memory - all for a lower cost. While we consider the Nvidia package to have value beyond the benchmarks, we understand entirely that others don't share our viewpoint - and for them, it's hard to argue against the GRE.

The numbers don't lie. It's a great product. For less money you get generally superior rasterisation performance compared to the RTX 4070 Super - and that very useful higher memory allocation. Meanwhile, on the RT scores, it's slower than the 4070 Super, obviously, but it often delivers parity or close to it to the similarly-priced RTX 4070.

So, how do we quantify that value with an at-a-glance chart? Similar to the RTX 4080 Super review, we've got our own take on the 'cost per frame' metric used by a number of PC tech journalists. Averaging a bunch of averages based on a non-linear scale (frames per second) doesn't make sense to me. So I asked developers for their opinion and this comment in particular stood out to me: "If you average two games at 30fps and 300fps, the first game will become insignificant while in real life, 0-30fps will be far more noticeable than 270-300fps. Or, the other way around, 10 games at 30fps will have as much of an impact as one game at 300fps."

A 'normalised' cost per frame is the suggested solution to this. We average the results from all GPUs for each game, then calculate variance of each card to that average. Then at the end, we scale all normalised values by the average of all average FPS on a per-game basis. This returns values that are 'averageable', enabling a more consistent, normalised 'cost per frame' that isn't biased by games that run at very low or very high frame-rates. In effect, we're 'porting over' a non-linear series of results to something that isn't distorted in the averaging process. This gives a more accurate look at relative value - but at the same time, for those who like the 'OG' way of doing things, we have that calculation too.

Something else I'd like to point out too is that our benchmark suite does have a lot of RT benchmarks in them. It's easy to imagine that cost differentials here would shift significantly further in AMD's direction if you concentrated on raster performance only - obviously. However, even with our current selection of games, both RX 7800 XT and 7900 GRE do offer more value, though on the normalised scale, the RTX 4070 Super isn't far behind AMD and does have DLSS. From a personal perspective, the only card I wouldn't be considering here is the vanilla RTX 4070 unless it received a more significant discount - but ultimately, it's great that users have so many good choices in this important market sector.

In short, the RX 7900 GRE continues the trend established by the 7800 XT: it makes the user ask themselves a lot of questions about what they want from their GPU. The GRE doesn't beat the excellent RTX 4070 Super comprehensively - but where it is better, it's got a significant advantage, the extra VRAM is a great thing to have and the lower pricing is clearly very compelling.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE analysis:

• Introduction
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control
• RT benchmarks: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, F1 22, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• RT/DLSS/FSR2/DLSS3 benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Forza Horizon 5, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5
• Game benchmarks: Hitman 3, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Returnal, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• Conclusions, value and recommendations [This Page]