AMD’s budget version of the 7900 XT GPU is coming to the US for $549

AMD will start selling the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) graphics card in the US, offering users a detuned version of its 7900 XT flagship for $549. For a savings of around $350 over the latter, it has performance on par with NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 Super for some games at some settings, according to AMD.

It offers impressive specs for that sum, including a Navi 31 XL GPU with 80 compute units (5120 stream processors), 160 AI accelerators and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. That’s just a bit less than the 20GB of GDDR6, 96 compute units and 168 AI accelerators in the 7900 XT. With that, it offers 26 to 46 FP32 TFLOPS, a bit lower than the 700 XT’s 32 to 51.6 FP32 TFLOPS. However, that means it also consumes less power — 260W TGP compared to the XT’s 315W.

All of that should make it a powerhouse at its 1440p resolution sweet spot. AMD claims it offers 14 percent more FPS per dollar at 1440p settings than the $549 RTX 4070 12GB. That includes games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and others at 4K. In some settings (comparable DLSS/FSR modes), it outperforms the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super, AMD claims.

At the same time, the 7900 GRE comes with new AI accelerators as part of the unified AMD RDNA 3 compute unit. With 160 AI accelerators and 16GB of DDR6 memory, it can generate Stable Diffusion images in less than a second, AMD said, or let you load your own large language model (LLM).

The 7900 GRE isn’t exactly an unknown entity, as it has been sold with PC builds (and even standalone), in Europe for awhile now as well as China. In general, you can expect better performance and lower power consumption than the 7800 XT (for just $50 more), and about a 20 percent drop off compared to the 7900 XT (for $350 less).

The 7900 GRE goes on sale starting tomorrow (February 27, 2024) for $549. That’s likely to be a sweet spot for a lot of US buyers, so if you’re looking to get one, act quickly. And if you want to spend a bit less, AMD is also lowering the US price of the RX 7700 XT to $419, $40 less than the original price, starting today.