Introduction

ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend is a premium custom design graphics card based on the not-so-new RX 7900 GRE, which is seeing a wider launch today. The RX 7900 GRE was originally launched as a China-exclusive product back in July 2023. It stayed in the market over the months, and AMD has found a new mission for it—competing with the GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and so it was just a matter of scaling up the production of this card, and having it shipped to certain markets outside China. The January 2024 introduction of the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super, and their impact on the real-world prices of the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti, is what set the ball in motion for today's wider launch of the RX 7900 GRE.



AMD carved the RX 7900 GRE out of the Navi 31 silicon powering the other RX 7900 series cards, such as the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, but this is the compacted Navi 31 package AMD originally designed for the mobile RX 7900 series GPUs. This package has a lower pin-count, with pins for just a 256-bit wide memory bus; and fewer power pins. We could be wrong, but the compact Navi 31 and Navi 32 could be sharing a pin-map, which makes the former compatible with PCBs AMD and its partners originally designed for the RX 7800 XT, which are simpler, and hence more cost-effective.

To create the RX 7900 GRE, AMD enabled 80 out of 96 compute units (CU) present on the Navi 31 graphics compute die (GCD), to result in 5,120 stream processors, 160 AI accelerators, 80 Ray accelerators, and 320 TMUs—somewhat similar counts to the RX 6950 XT, but on a newer architecture. 160 out of 192 ROPs are enabled. The memory sub-system sees a 256-bit memory bus drive 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory for 576 GB/s of bandwidth on tap—same as the RX 6950 XT. What sets the RX 7900 XT apart from this card is the wider 320-bit memory bus driving 20 GB of faster 20 Gbps memory for 38% more bandwidth; besides 4 extra CU.

The RDNA 3 graphics architecture powering the RX 7900 GRE introduces new dual-issue rate compute units, with vastly improved idle SIMD resource utilization, and support for new math formats. The company claims generational IPC uplifts over the RDNA2 compute units to the tune of 17%. Taking advantage of the newer 5 nm node, AMD is also running the shader engines at higher clock speeds than the previous generation. The company also introduced Ray Accelerator, a component inside the CU that accelerates matrix math functions by utilizing the SIMD units, which should accelerate AI DNN building and training. The second generation Ray Accelerator is designed to provide a 50% generational improvement in ray intersection performance. Another interesting change introduced with RDNA 3 is that the GPU's front-end operates at a 10-15% higher clock speed than the shader engines.

The ASRock RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend is a slick new white-themed trim. In its product stack, the Steel Legend is positioned between the Challenger OC and Phantom Gaming SKUs. Besides a triple-slot cooling solution, you get multicolor LED lighting for the card's trio of fans; and a slight factory overclock. According to ASRock, the Steel Legend is priced at $570, a small $20 increase over the AMD MSRP.