This Chinese version of a popular AMD graphics card is now on sale worldwide – and it’s actually worth buying
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 made to be among the Radeon 7800XT and the Radeon 7900XT as the third model of AMD’s largest Navi 31 GPU using the RDNA 3 architecture, according to the Tom’s Hardware Review. It’s a big improvement over the 7800 XT as it has 60 compute units (CUs), while the 7900 GRE has 80 CUs, which is a 33% increase.
The starting price is $549, which puts it in the mid-range Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super and the baseline Nvidia RTX4070. A smart idea, as AMD could easily compete with Nvidia and take a place among them best graphics cards. And from what we see in terms of specs and performance, it matches up well with or even exceeds similar cards on the market that are priced around the same or higher.
Originally the RX 7900 GRE was only launched in China, but has since been slowly introduced to the rest of the world. As of February 26, 2024, it will be officially available in the US for a retail price of $549. Originally planned for a China-only release, AMD decided to bring the graphics card to the global market due to the “changing competitive landscape of the GPU market.”
Why did AMD wait for a global release?
It’s objectively a good call for AMD to bring the Radeon RX 7900 GRE to the global market, especially considering the lack of affordable mid-range graphics cards this generation. But why did AMD wait so long to release it outside of China in the first place?
When the RX 7900 GRE first launched, there were plenty of other mid-range choices, such as the RX 6950 XT, 6900 XT, and 6800 XT. But as dwindling inventory left space on store shelves, the opportunity opened up for the 7900 GRE to replace them, especially since it fits right between the 7800 XT and the 7900 XT.
Considering how excellent these two cards are, with four and a half out of five stars and four out of five stars respectively, making this card a comparable achievement is quite an achievement. Regardless of the wait, it’s great to see that we can take advantage of another excellent mid-range option.