A few days ago, news broke that AMD and its partners are preparing a limited edition graphics card for the Chinese market: the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition), a limited edition card to be released to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit. The GRE does not appear to be just another RX 7900 XT variant. In fact, it appears to be a new and interesting model.

Sapphire's box photo confirms that the card has 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit bus. My first thought was that GRE was using the flagship Navi 31 GPU. In effect, it is an RX 7900 XT with 5376 shaders and two of the six memory controllers disabled.

That makes sense given that the RX 7900 XTX has 24GB of VRAM and 384-bit bus with all six MCDs enabled, while the RX 7900 XT has 20GB of VRAM and 320-bit bus with one disabled.

However, according to an analysis by Videocardz using photos provided by I won't call it X Twitter user @wnxod, the RX 7900 GRE does not use Navi 31, but rather something different. This is because the GPU package profile and the location of the components on the back of the card are very different.

"So what is it?" of course I don't know, but I like to speculate! [But I can't imagine why AMD would name this the 7900 series. Also, 300W TDP is too high for a third tier card. [but even 250W would not be far behind the power efficiency of Nvidia's RTX 4070.

Videocardz speculates that the RX 7900 GRE GPU is a repackaging of the Navi 31 with a smaller footprint and may be a stopgap measure to fill the hole left by the absence of the Navi 32-based RX 7800.

This scenario raises further speculation as to why AMD would do such a thing. If it is a first aid measure, it would be consistent with their decision to sell this card only in China. It could be an effort to recoup development costs or simply to release something different for the Year of the Rabbit. Perhaps, if Navi 32 is released, AIB manufacturers could reuse the RX 7900 GRE PCB.

But there is something else to ponder. Why doesn't AMD release a Navi 32-based card?" Indeed, as far as the yield of the Navi 31 is concerned, dropping one small MCD is not going to make or break the bank. Does this point to the poor performance of Navi 32?

A really interesting card, even if it is only a topic for the most tragic of us GPU enthusiasts. Whatever is lurking under the hood of the RX 7900 GRE, we will soon find out, as the card in question is scheduled to be released in China on July 28.