AMD is rumored to be prepping the RX 7650 GRE for launch early next year, but according to Benchlife.info, it won’t debut at CES.
Citing its sources, the publication claims that the 7650 GRE is unlikely to be revealed at CES in January, directly denying rumors that the midrange card would debut at the Las Vegas event. Instead, at least initially, the GPU will come in the first quarter of the year or by the end of March and will be exclusive to China.
Benchlife.info says the 7650 GRE exists to clear inventory of AMD’s Navi 33-based GPUs, the RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT, serving a similar purpose that the RX 6750 GRE did for RX 6000 GPUs. The report suggests that AMD wants to clear inventory ahead of the rumored launch of the RX 8000 series at CES.
While we can be confident that the 7650 GRE will feature some price cut (it would be difficult to eliminate excess supply without one), Benchlife.info isn’t sure whether the rebranded GPU would be more like the 7600 or the 7600 XT. Both GPUs use the full 32 compute units in the Navi 33 chip and have a similar clock speed, but the 7600 has 8GB of VRAM to the 7600 XT’s 16GB.
Since price is likely the most important factor in selling the 7650 GRE, it would be very appealing for AMD to opt for 8GB instead of 16GB. On the other hand, a cheap GPU with 16GB of memory could appeal to some users, much like the RTX 3060 12GB did. The 7600 XT is by far the most affordable 16GB card on the market, more than a hundred dollars less expensive than the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and the RX 7800 XT.
Overall, whether AMD goes with 8GB or 16GB is unlikely to impact gaming performance much, if at all. How highly the 7650 GRE is clocked will likely be more important, but since there’s just 100MHz separating the 7600 and 7600 XT, it probably won’t matter too much where the 7650 GRE lands in that range. That’s assuming AMD doesn’t decide to give the 7650 GRE a significantly higher frequency; it didn’t for the 6750 GRE.
