Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pulse and Nitro+ Review

the Introduction and Technical Specifications

Introduction

Today we have the latest entries into the AMD Radeon range of graphics cards, the RX 7900 GRE. We have to be honest and say that we didn’t think there was any room left in the Radeon range in which to squeeze another. The RX 7800 XT is very capable, and the RX 7900 XT is not that much more expensive and only a bit faster. Perhaps AMD looked at the recent mess that Nvidia made of their range with their Super cards and thought they could do likewise.

However, if the RX 7900 XT is too expensive, but the RX 7800 XT not quite fast enough for you, maybe you too will be interested in the RX 7900 GRE. Priced at £549 for the MRSP cards, it’s good value for what you’re getting. We’ve got two different Sapphire cards to show it off today. For those who want to spend the least possible but still get a GRE, we have the Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pulse. We’ve looked at other Sapphire cards, most recently the Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse and always found them to be great value for money.

We know that some of you prefer cards with beefy factory overclocks, and that’s where the Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Nitro+ comes in. It boasts a 100 MHz overclock when compared to the Pulse. However, it’s also got a light bar – shown above – and a sturdier cooler that allows it to boost even further than the Pulse. Certainly the slight price increase – up by £50 to £599 – is backed by enough additions to be worthwhile. We would expect nothing less from Sapphire, who have been producing AMD graphics cards since the dawn of time.

So if you’re after a new AMD Radeon card, does the RX 7900 GRE do enough to tempt you? Let’s find out.

Technical Specifications

The RX 7900 GRE fits perfect in between the cards above and below it. Based around the RDNA 3 architecture, it has 80 Compute Units, 80 Ray Accelerators and 5120 Stream processors. The RX 7800 XT, by contrast, has 60/60/3840 respectively, whilst the RX 7900 XT boasts 84/84/5376. Thus the GRE is definitely in the RX 7900 end of the AMD Radeon range. Probably the biggest surprise is the Texture Fill-Rate. With not much less hardware than the RX 7900 XT on the PCB the GRE hits 340 GT/s, compared to 810 GT/s on the XT. For comparison the RX 7800 XT has a listed 233 GT/s. Is this a typo? Because on paper there is no reason for that number to have dropped like a stone. We’ll find out in our testing where how these two cards really perform.