The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE has been one of the weird graphics card launches in historical past, because of its on once more, off once more China exclusivity, and now its story has taken yet one more flip. AMD has simply launched a brand new driver for the cardboard that lets customers overclock its VRAM, unlocking plenty of beforehand untapped efficiency.
The RX 7900 GRE was already in with an opportunity of a spot on our greatest graphics card information – we’re engaged on our evaluation proper now – however that potential has been boosted even additional because of this new AMD driver.
To recap, the RX 7900 GRE launched in mid 2023 as a card completely obtainable in China, though it fairly rapidly turned obtainable in a number of different Australasian territories, notably as an possibility in pre-built PCs. Because the months handed, the cardboard turned increasingly more extensively obtainable, till earlier this 12 months, it appeared within the UK. What has adopted is a reasonably lowkey international launch that has seen the cardboard slot into the worldwide GPU market to tackle the brand new RTX 4070 Tremendous.
The cardboard is predicated on the identical GPU because the RX 7900 XT and XTX however with a number of extra elements disabled. It has 80 compute models enabled, giving it 5,120 stream processors, which isn’t far off the 5,376 stream processors within the RX 7900 XT, and much more than the three,840 within the 7800 XT. The cardboard even comes with an enormous 16GB of VRAM, although it solely makes use of a 256-bit reminiscence bus in comparison with the 7900 XT’s 320-bit bus.
Nonetheless, one of many key limiting elements of the cardboard up till this level has been its restricted reminiscence clock pace. Whereas the RX 7900 XT has the identical 256-bit reminiscence bus, its reminiscence is clocked at 2,500MHz (20Gbps efficient), whereas the RX 7900 GRE was restricted to only 2,250MHz (18Gbps efficient).
The brand new RX 7900 GRE driver, then, which is wrapped up as a part of the most recent official AMD Adrenalin 24.3.1 WHQL driver bundle, unlocks the flexibility to extend reminiscence clock pace, permitting customers to crank the reminiscence pace all the best way as much as 3,000MHz. TechPowerUp studies that it has efficiently tried this tweak, which boosted the cardboard’s 3DMark TimeSpy Excessive GT1 body fee from 67.1fps to 77.1fps – a rise of 14.9%.
How this impacts the last word worth of the cardboard proper now’s an element we’ll be assessing in our upcoming evaluation, however it places the cardboard on a agency footing for snatching our greatest graphics card advice for the $500-$550 vary.
Curiously, the motive force replace is definitely one thing of a workaround for what AMD calls a bug within the initially launched variations of the GRE playing cards. Having all initially been shipped with an overclocking restrict constructed into the firmware of those playing cards, which might’t merely be modified by a driver however would as a substitute require all the cardboard distributors to concern a firmware replace, the motive force as a substitute reprograms the ability limits on the GPU at boot-up. Sensible!
In the meantime, in case you’re pondering of shopping for a graphics card however aren’t positive how you can go about upgrading your system, you may try our how you can construct a gaming PC information for full step-by-step construct and improve directions.
