Enlarge / ASRock's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In July 2023, AMD released a new GPU called the "Radeon RX 7900 GRE" in China. GRE stands for "Golden Rabbit Edition," a reference to the Chinese zodiac, and while the card was available outside of China in a handful of pre-built OEM systems, AMD didn't make it widely available at retail.

That changes today—AMD is launching the RX 7900 GRE at US retail for a suggested starting price of $549. This throws it right into the middle of the busy upper-mid-range graphics card market, where it will compete with Nvidia's $549 RTX 4070 and the $599 RTX 4070 Super, as well as AMD's own $500 Radeon RX 7800 XT.

We've run our typical set of GPU tests on the 7900 GRE to see how it stacks up to the cards AMD and Nvidia are already offering. Is it worth buying a new card relatively late in this GPU generation, when rumors point to new next-gen GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel before the end of the year? Can the "Golden Rabbit Edition" still offer a good value, even though it's currently the year of the dragon?

Enlarge / Intel's Core Ultra chips are some of the first x86 PC processors to include built-in NPUs. Software support will slowly follow. (credit: Intel)

When it announced the new Copilot key for PC keyboards last month, Microsoft declared 2024 "the year of the AI PC." On one level, this is just an aspirational PR-friendly proclamation, meant to show investors that Microsoft intends to keep pushing the AI hype cycle that has put it in competition with Apple for the title of most valuable publicly traded company .

But on a technical level, it is true that PCs made and sold in 2024 and beyond will generally include AI and machine-learning processing capabilities that older PCs don't. The main thing is the neural processing unit (NPU), a specialized block on recent high-end Intel and AMD CPUs that can accelerate some kinds of generative AI and machine-learning workloads more quickly (or while using less power) than the CPU or GPU could.

Qualcomm's Windows PCs were some of the first to include an NPU, since the Arm processors used in most smartphones have included some kind of machine-learning acceleration for a few years now (Apple's M-series chips for Macs all have them, too, going all the way back to 2020's M1). But the Arm version of Windows is a insignificantly tiny sliver of the entire PC market; x86 PCs with Intel's Core Ultra chips, AMD's Ryzen 7040/8040-series laptop CPUs, or the Ryzen 8000G desktop CPUs will be many mainstream PC users' first exposure to this kind of hardware.

Enlarge / The most interesting thing about AMD's Ryzen 7 8700G CPU is the Radeon 780M GPU that's attached to it. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Put me on the short list of people who can get excited about the humble, much-derided integrated GPU.

Yes, most of them are afterthoughts, designed for office desktops and laptops that will spend most of their lives rendering 2D images to a single monitor. But when integrated graphics push forward, it can open up possibilities for people who want to play games but can only afford a cheap desktop (or who have to make do with whatever their parents will pay for, which was the big limiter on my PC gaming experience as a kid).

That, plus an unrelated but accordant interest in building small mini-ITX-based desktops, has kept me interested in AMD’s G-series Ryzen desktop chips (which it sometimes calls “APUs,” to distinguish them from the Ryzen CPUs). And the Ryzen 8000G chips are a big upgrade from the 5000G series that immediately preceded them (this makes sense, because as we all know the number 8 immediately follows the number 5).

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  XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year's RX 7600 , but with a mild bump to the GPU's clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600.

It's a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren't worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It's priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you otherwise generally need to jump up into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond.

The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we've already seen. The clock speed bumps do provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM does become apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn't fundamentally alter the AMD-vs-Nvidia-vs-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600's most glaring weaknesses.

Enlarge / The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat. (credit: AMD)

Graphics card buyers seem to have a lot of anxiety about buying a GPU with enough memory installed, even in midrange graphics cards that aren't otherwise equipped to play games at super-high resolutions. And while this anxiety tends to be a bit overblown—lots of first- and third-party testing of cards like the GeForce 4060 Ti shows that just a handful of games benefit when all you do is boost GPU memory from 8 to 16GB—there's still a market for less-expensive GPUs with big pools of memory.

That's the apparent impetus behind AMD's sole GPU announcement from its slate of CES news today: the $329 Radeon RX 7600 XT, a version of last year's $269 RX 7600 with twice as much memory, slightly higher clock speeds, and higher power use to go with it.

The core specifications of the 7600 XT remain the same as the regular 7600: 32 of AMD's compute units (CUs) based on the RDNA3 GPU architecture, and the same memory clock speed attached to the same 128-bit memory bus. But RAM has been boosted from 8GB to 16GB, and the GPU's clock speeds have been boosted a little, ensuring that the card runs games a little faster than the regular 7600, even in games that don't care about the extra memory.

Enlarge / Four new Ryzen 5000 CPUs, all riffs on existing Ryzen 5000 CPUs. (credit: AMD)

AMD announced the first Ryzen 8000 desktop processors today: a new lineup of socket AM5 CPUs that bring RDNA 3 integrated GPUs and an AI-accelerating NPU to its desktop platform for the first time. But the company also spent some time on new budget chips for its last-generation AM4 platform. The four new Ryzen 5000 processors cover everything from budget office desktops with integrated GPUs to cost-conscious gaming systems.

At the top of the range is the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, an 8-core CPU with an extra 64MB slab of L3 cache stacked on top of the main CPU die. At $249, it will be a little over $100 cheaper than the 5800X3D, but with the same core count, cache size, and a slightly lower maximum clock speed (4.1 GHz, down from 4.5 GHz). AMD compared it favorably to the Core i5-13600K in gaming workloads, a chip that currently retails for a bit over $280.

The Ryzen 7 5700 is a $175 8-core processor without 3D V-Cache that should still perform reasonably well in most workloads, though AMD's spec sheet says that it has less cache than the 5700X and only supports PCI Express 3.0 instead of PCIe 4.0. This indicates that the 5700 is actually a 5700G with the integrated graphics disabled; it will be a bit slower than the Ryzen 5700X, despite their similar names, core counts, and clock speeds. The Ryzen 5 5600GT and 5500GT are 6- and 4-core chips with Vega-based integrated graphics, both intended for lower-end systems. At $140 and $125, they essentially amount to minor clock speed bumps for the existing Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 3 5300G .

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In many ways, 2023 was a long-awaited return to normalcy for people who build their own gaming and/or workstation PCs. For the entire year, most mainstream components have been available at or a little under their official retail prices, making it possible to build all kinds of PCs at relatively reasonable prices without worrying about restocks or waiting for discounts. It was a welcome continuation of some GPU trends that started in 2022. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel could release a new GPU, and you could consistently buy that GPU for roughly what it was supposed to cost.

That's where we get into how frustrating 2023 was for GPU buyers, though. Cards like the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 series launched in late 2022 and boosted performance beyond what any last-generation cards could achieve. But 2023's midrange GPU launches were less ambitious. Not only did they offer the performance of a last-generation GPU, but most of them did it for around the same price as the last-gen GPUs whose performance they matched.

The midrange runs in place

Not every midrange GPU launch will get us a GTX 1060 —a card roughly 50 percent faster than its immediate predecessor and beat the previous-generation GTX 980 despite costing just a bit over half as much money. But even if your expectations were low, this year's midrange GPU launches have been underwhelming.

Enlarge / A now-deleted Intel presentation makes a good point, but with a side of disingenuousness.

AMD changed the way it numbers its Ryzen laptop processors last year, switching to a new system that simultaneously provides more concrete information than the old one while also partially obfuscating the exact age of the various CPU and GPU architectures being mixed-and-matched.

For instance, a knowledgeable buyer can look at the "3" in the Ryzen 5 7530U processor and determine that it uses an older Zen 3-based CPU core. But a less-knowledgeable buyer could be forgiven for looking at the "7000" part and assuming that the chip is significantly newer and better than 2021's Ryzen 5600U, when in reality the two are substantially identical.

Intel came out swinging against this naming scheme in a confrontational slide deck this week—now deleted, but preserved for posterity by VideoCardz—where it accuses AMD of selling "snake oil" by using older processor architectures in ostensibly "new" chips.