Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 GRE brings the white theme to those seeking out the performance segment graphics card by AMD that's been around since July 2023, but which is seeing a wider launch in parts of Europe today. The RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) was originally designed by AMD to be a China-exclusive performance segment SKU produced in limited volumes, but this, along with the feverishly popular RX 6750 GRE, have captured the Chinese market well. The RX 7900 GRE is coming to more markets in the West, because this market segment has seen quite some action with the introduction of the GeForce RTX 4070 Super and the RTX 4070 Ti Super, which have sent prices of the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti down, creating a tightly packed market under the $600-mark.



The introduction of the RTX 4070 Super has the RX 7800 XT embattled, with its price rapidly sliding down from its $500 launch to around $450; creating a rather large performance gap between it and the RX 7900 XT. It's more cost-effective for AMD to scale up production of the RX 7900 GRE and bring it to Western shores, than to create a new SKU such as, say, the "RX 7900 XL." AMD took an interesting approach to creating the RX 7900 GRE, which results in lower board costs than something like the RX 7900 XT.

AMD had created a compacted package of the Navi 31 chiplet GPU to carve out mobile RX 7900 series SKUs, with the smaller package with lesser Z-height helping with gaming notebooks, where PCB real-estate is scarce. The smaller package is roughly the size of a Navi 32 that powers the RX 7800 XT, and has fewer pins. In particular, it only has pins for a 256-bit wide memory bus, and fewer power pins, meaning that to create the RX 7900 GRE, AMD went with 16 GB of memory; and a lower 260 W power limit compared to something like the RX 7900 XTX, which has 24 GB of memory across the 384-bit memory bus of the regular Navi 31 package, and a 355 W power limit.

To carve out the RX 7900 GRE, AMD enabled 80 out of 96 compute units (CU) present on the 5 nm graphics compute die (GCD). This results in 5,120 stream processors, 160 AI accelerators, and 80 Ray accelerators, along with 320 TMUs. The company also enabled 160 out of the 192 ROPs present. The memory configuration looks a lot like that of the RX 7800 XT. Since just four of the six memory cache dies (MCDs) are enabled, the RX 7900 GRE gets 64 MB of Infinity Cache, and a 256-bit wide memory bus. AMD pairs this with 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, for 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The CU count of the RX 7900 GRE may look close to that of the RX 7900 XT—80 vs. 84, but there are significant differences. The RX 7900 XT features a wider 320-bit memory bus and 80 MB of Infinity Cache thanks to five MCDs being enabled driving 20 GB of 20 Gbps memory, for 38% higher memory bandwidth. It also gets Navi 31's full 192 ROP count, and a higher 300 W power limit, which is why it remains a segment higher than the RX 7900 GRE. The RX 7800 XT may have the same memory specs as the RX 7900 GRE, but with 25% fewer shaders over just 60 CU, and just 96 ROPs.

The RDNA 3 graphics architecture by AMD is designed to make the most out of the 5 nm foundry process. The new dual-instruction issue rate compute unit comes with a 17% IPC increase over RDNA 2, and support for higher GPU clocks. The front-end operates at a higher frequency than the shader engines for more energy efficiency. AMD introduced the new AI accelerators, a pair per dual-CU, which prepares matrix math for processing by the stream processors, offering significant speed-ups. The second generation Ray accelerator offers a 50% increase in ray intersection performance over RDNA 2. Lastly, the new MDIA (multi-draw indirect accelerator) offers significant speed-ups to DirectX 12 applications that implement the multi-draw indirect instruction.

The Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pure has a lot in common with the RX 7900 GRE Pulse, including a geometrically-identical board design that differs with the white color trim on the Pure. Besides this trim, the Pure gets a fixed-color LED setup, with a manual lighting switch on the card (these are not RGB LEDs); and a slightly higher factory overclock. Sapphire is pricing the card at $570, a tiny $20 premium over the AMD MSRP.