AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE Linux Performance

Last July AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card in China with a reduced Navi 31 GPU. Beginning tomorrow, 27 February, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is being made available worldwide. Today the review embargo expires on the Radeon RX 7900 GRE for the worldwide scope and within the US will be priced around $549 USD.

AMD is making the Radeon RX 7900 GRE available worldwide to fit in between the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics cards. The Radeon RX 7900 XT continues to retail for $699~719 USD while rolling out the Radeon RX 7900 GRE at $549 USD allows it to be better positioned against the recently launched NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER at $599 USD.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE features 80 compute units compared to 84 with the RX 7900 XT or 96 with the RX 7900 XTX. There's also 160 AI accelerators compared to 168 with the RX 7900 XT or 192 with the RX 7900 XTX. The game clock and boost clock are at 1880MHz and 2245MHz, respectively, compared to 2000MHz and 2400MHz with the RX 7900 XT. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE also only has 16GB of GDDR6 vRAM compared to 20GB with the RX 7900 XT and 24GB with the RX 7900 XTX.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE is rated for a 260 Watt total board power rating, down from 315 Watts with the RX 7900 XT. For this announcement-day testing on Phoronix. AMD supplied Phoronix with an ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card for our review/benchmarking.

AMD on Tuesday will release the Radeon Software for Linux 23.40.2 driver package that provides Radeon RX 7900 GRE support officially. The Radeon Software for Linux 23.40.2 officially supports Ubuntu 20.04.6 / 22.04.4, RHEL 8.9 / 9.3, and SUSE SLED/SLES 15 SP5. For those using modern upstream desktop Linux distributions like Ubuntu 23.10, you should be in good shape for the open-source driver support. Mind you, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE launched in China last year and is another Radeon RX 7900 series graphics card.

For the purposes of offering a leading-edge look at the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and other tested Radeon RX 6000/7000 series graphics cards, for this testing all of the AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested on Ubuntu 23.10 while upgrading to the Linux 6.7 kernel and Mesa 24.1-devel via the Oibaf PPA. The NVIDIA graphics cards were all freshly re-tested on Ubuntu 23.10 while using Linux 6.7 + NVIDIA 550.40.07. The same AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop system was used throughout all of this graphics card (re)testing for a fresh look at the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and other hardware under Linux.

The tested graphics cards based on recent hardware I had available included:

- RTX 3070 Ti
- RTX 3080
- RTX 3080 Ti
- RTX 3090
- RTX 4060
- RTX 4070
- RTX 4070 SUPER
- RTX 4070 Ti SUPER
- RTX 4080
- RTX 4080 SUPER
- RTX 4090
- RX 7600 XT
- RX 7700 XT
- RX 7800 XT
- RX 7900 GRE
- RX 7900 XT
- RX 7900 XTX

This article is focused on various Linux gaming benchmarks while a follow-up article will be looking at the GPU OpenCL/compute performance on these consumer graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.