AMD RX 7900 GRE gets a free performance boost – is this the best mid-range GPU you can buy right now?
AMD’s RX 7900 GRE became available in the US (and elsewhere) last month, but with an odd catch in the performance department – the good news is that this GPU overclocking issue has now been resolved.
If you’ve been following the somewhat curious story of the global launch of the RX 7900 GRE – the ‘Golden Rabbit Edition’ graphics card that was initially exclusive to China – you may remember that it was artificially limited to 2.3 GHz due to its memory clock speed due to a bug, as confirmed by AMD. Apparently this was an issue with an incorrect memory tuning limit.
Well, that problem has now been fixed with AMD’s new Adrenalin Edition 24.3.1 driver. As Team Red says in the release notesis there a fix for the “maximum memory tuning limit (which) is incorrectly reported on AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics products.”
VideoCardz noted this development and reports that with the new driver, Technical power-up has found that it can increase the memory clock by 300MHz, providing a significant performance boost. Running at 2.6GHz instead of 2.3GHz results in a 15% boost in 3DMark (Time Spy).
Note that this is the memory clock, which is different from the GPU clock speed, and should not be confused with it. The GPU chip is also limited for overclocking, as our previous report highlighted, but AMD has taken no action on that front.
Analysis: GREAT weapons
This is just one synthetic test, so we have to be a little careful, but other benchmarking online is not possible Hardware out of the box shows similarly impressive results (in gaming tests, and in a large number of them too).
However, we should point out that other online reports suggest that RX 7900 GRE owners are far from guaranteed to be able to run a VRAM overclock as ambitious as 2.6GHz, or even push past 2.5GHz (on that note, reaching 2.4GHz anecdotally proves that to be a challenge for some graphics cards).
As always with any chip, the mileage you get out of your video memory will be different from others – but everyone should still be able to realize a valuable performance advantage here. If it’s not 10-15%, there should still be quite a bit of wiggle room now that AMD has fixed this bug, and many people are reporting an increase of around 5% or at least close to that.
With this extra chunk of framerates under its belt, the 7900 GRE now seems like an even more tempting proposition. Assuming you’re confident enough with PC hardware to dabble in overclocking, not everyone will want to.
The RX 7900 GRE was already a great mid-range performer before this happened, and at its current price it now looks to be the best GPU in this price range, especially for those willing to overclock it with an overclock. It looks better than the rival RTX 4070 Super with this new AMD driver, and the RX 7900 GRE is about 7% cheaper than Team Green’s graphics card, based on current prices on Newegg in the US (for the cheapest models in stock).
Relative pricing may be a different story in your area, but you get the point. Because the 7900 GRE is also within 10% of the performance of the a lot of The more expensive 7900 XT is now, as Hardware Unboxed points out, a possible alternative to the latter.
We’d be remiss to mention that with the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super comparison you obviously lose out on ray tracing and DLSS 3 – but for pure rasterization it’s the 7900 GRE as the price goes, with this extra a boost to the Director. Nvidia and its partners may need to respond here…