AMD's China-Only Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16GB Debuts: Navi 31 with Cut-Down Memory
AMD's partners are beginning to roll-out the company's Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards that will be available exclusively in China and will offer a cheaper alternative to the Radeon RX 7900 XT. @wxnod has just published pictures of Sapphire's Radeon RX 7900 GRE, whereas ScrubWiki revealed its specifications, which are quite surprising.
As it turns out, China-exclusive Radeon RX 7900 GRE is based on the Navi 31 GPU with 5376 stream processors enabled and running at 1.50 GHz – 2.40 GHz, which is the same configuration as that of the Radeon RX 7900 XT. There is one important difference though. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE disables one more memory controller die (MCD) and therefore comes with 16GB of GDDR6 memory along with a 256-bit memory interface.
As a result, AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE can boast the same 32 FP32 TFLOPS – 51.6 FP32 TFLOPS (base – boost) compute horsepower as the Radeon RX 7900 XT, yet it only has 64MB of Infinity Cache (with bandwidth reduced to 2.56 GB/s) as well as 16GB of memory (with bandwidth reduced to 640 MB/s).
It remains to be seen how AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE performs in real-world applications, but it is logical to presume that its performance will be similar to that of the Radeon RX 7900 XT in cases where compute horsepower matters and will be noticeably lower in cases where memory bandwidth is required. In general, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE should be significantly behind the Radeon RX 7900 XT in high resolutions and/or in cases where sophisticated antialiasing algorithms are enabled.
When it comes to Sapphire's Nitro+ Radeon RX 7900 GRE, this graphics board features two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors and is rated for around 300W thermal graphics power (TGP). To cool down the rather hot Navi 31 GRE GPU, Sapphire uses a rather large 2.5-wide triple-fan cooling system, which is considerably thinner than the company uses on its Nitro+ Radeon RX 7900 XT.
Perhaps the most intriguing part about AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE is its price. It should naturally be cheaper compared to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, but for now we can only wonder how much cheaper it is.
