Review – Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 GRE

So AMD has decided to release the Radeon RX 7900 GRE globally starting Feb 27th at the price of $549. The GRE model, also known as the Golden Rabbit Edition was supposedly exclusive for the China market last year to compete against the GeForce RTX 4070.

However, NVIDIA has already replaced it with the RTX 4070 SUPER and it’s the year of the dragon now, so AMD’s global release for Radeon RX 7900 GRE is somewhat awkward at this point. Still, we compared it against both RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER just to find out what this card is capable of.

Overview

This is the Sapphire Pulse RX 7900 GRE, one of the custom models you can get from the board partners. While the box design is mostly similar to the existing Pulse series cards and the cooler design is almost identical to the higher-end RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, it was a product targeted at the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER this time.

AMD recommends a 700W power supply for this model and it has a rated TBP of 260W. You can still power the card with a 650W power supply as long as you know what you’re doing. The card still uses 2 x PCIe 8-pin connectors, of course, which makes it compatible with older power supplies, unlike the 12VHWPR header which NVIDIA now enforces on its newer GPUs.

As for the display output options, it has 2 x DP and 2 x HDMI, which can be very useful to users who need more than one HDMI port for their system.

System Specs

Our games benchmark test focused on various AAA titles, running them at their maximum settings using the following list of hardware under an ambient temperature of 28°C:

Games Benchmark – Raster Performance

While the RX 7900 GRE was intended for 1440P gaming according to AMD, it is capable of 4K gaming and it’s able to achieve more than 60fps on the majority of the titles we have tested, except for those very demanding titles like Alan Wake 2, and Cyberpunk 2077. In Watch Dogs Legion, the high memory capacity helps a lot and we can see a very decent 72fps average and 62fps 1% low, easily beating the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER.

Scaling down to 1440p, despite all the cards tested being able to easily achieve more than 80fps in all of the titles tested, the RX 7900 GRE can be seen performing better than both NVIDIA counterparts most of the time. It is about 8-10% better than the RTX 4070 SUPER in terms of performance.

We can see similar patterns in 1080p as well but the performance difference between the 7900 GRE and 4070 SUPER is slightly higher this time, averaging at 13-15% in the titles tested.

Games Benchmark – Ray Tracing

Moving on to the ray tracing performance, it is almost certain that NVIDIA is going to have an upper hand in this test, what we have done here is to show how taxing some titles can be even though they’re all equipped with the ray tracing feature alongside FSR. For titles with FSR3, we’ll leave that out for now as we only wanted to see the raw ray tracing performance.

At 4K resolution, we struggle with Cyberpunk in areas with denser populations and during fights, meanwhile, Alan Wake 2 is pretty much unplayable with the ray tracing set to highest by default. The rest of the titles tested are still somewhat playable, much to our surprise.

The overall situation gets much better as we scale down to 1440p, as most of the titles are playable with 60fps+ now, except for Alan Wake 2 which still gives us an average of 43fps but we can still experience random lag spikes as we navigate through the environment.

All the titles are very playable at 1080p but the overall visual experience will not be as good as what you’ll get on higher resolution.

Quick Note: For those of you who are curious about why the results for Alan Wake 2 aren’t that great on the RX 7900 GRE, path tracing is automatically enabled when you select the highest ray tracing settings for Alan Wake 2 and we’re just doing the test according to the scenario where one will just select the highest preset without any additional micro-adjustments. While path tracing is also available on Cyberpunk 2077, it’s not enabled by default when you select the highest ray tracing preset. So aside from 4K resolution, you can disable path tracing for Alan Wake 2 to be more playable on 1440P and 1080P for the RX 7900 GRE.

So, is that it for AMD? Well, not quite.  Be it NVIDIA or AMD, both are actively working on improving the feature and hopefully, reducing the occurrence of the artifacts that many of us saw in some of these artificially generated frames. Despite not having as many titles that support frame-gen as what we can see on the GeForce cards at first, we can see more titles with FSR3 support on its way, which is benefiting not only Radeon cards but also older GeForce cards that don’t get the DLSS 3 frame-gen feature.

Although I can still see people talking about frame-gen being the ‘fake’ performance boost, there are also people who started to accept the idea of having these artificially generated frames to boost the overall performance. It is never a feature that is perfect to begin with but if the games that you play have this feature available, just give it a try first and judge later.

Thermals & Power Draw

And here comes the part that might concern some users, the power draw and thermals. Unsurprisingly, the higher-performance RX 7900 GRE has a higher recorded power draw than both the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER, which is at 200W and 220W respectively.

As for thermals, the Sapphire Pulse RX 7900 GRE is definitely on the higher side. With GPU load temperature peaked at 78°C, alongside the memory junction and hotspot temperature peaked at 96°C and 89°C respectively, you might want to consider increasing the fan curve to improve the cooling performance.

Final Thoughts

From the test results, ray tracing performance is something the RX 7900 GRE still lacks when compared to the RTX 4070 but the situation is slowly improving right now. The raster performance is pretty okay in general and can be seen doing better than the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER. Compared to what we’ve seen on the Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, ray tracing performance has greatly improved on the Radeon RX 7000 series but the GeForce cards are still the clear winner in this category. However, you can still take advantage of AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) for a quick performance boost without having to enable ray tracing at all.

Like it or not, ray tracing is here to stay but at least things are looking better for AMD with FSR3, notably AFMF which puts Radeon cards in a much better position when competing against GeForce cards. However that only applies to titles that have the feature supported as not every game has it, especially older titles that only have DLSS.

So, is the RX 7900 GRE worth getting? For the price of $549, it’s not a bad price but I believe there will be users who are willing to spend that $50 more to get an RTX 4070 SUPER for DLSS3 and better ray tracing performance. If you’re mainly looking for the better raster performance for the money you’re paying (which I think a lot of people still do) or maybe, are okay with enabling AFMF for the extra performance gain, the RX 7900 GRE is something you can still look into.

Where to buy? (Affiliate links)

• Amazon
• Lazada
• Shopee