Review: AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 GRE is a disappointing way to spend $549

At some point during the fog of 2021 or 2022, I noticed that my son’s preferred brand of fruit snacks had switched from including 0.9 ounces per pouch to 0.8 ounces per pouch. Most shrinkflation is meant to fly under the radar, but in this case, I just happened to notice it. It felt bad! It’s tangible evidence that your money is not going as far as it did in the very recent past.

A little over a year ago, AMD launched the Radeon RX 9070 for a suggested retail price of $549. This month, it’s launching the similarly named Radeon RX 9070 GRE for a suggested retail price of $549. This new card (actually the US launch of a GPU that’s been available in China for a year or so) has 85 percent as many GPU cores, 75 percent as much memory, and 66 percent as much memory bandwidth as the regular RX 9070.

We’ll evaluate the RX 9070 GRE in the context of the current GPU market, where prices have been edging upward due to the same AI-driven RAM shortages and price hikes that have made PC building and buying such a miserable experience for the last few months. But it’s hard not to be a little upset about such a clear example of GPU shrinkflation—the same money for a markedly inferior product.

RX 9070 GRE specs and speeds

I find AMD’s “GRE” label more confusing than helpful. “Extra letters” usually means “better,” across both AMD and Nvidia’s GPU lineups (see XT, Ti, XTX, Super, etc), but in this case, it means “worse.”

The RX 9070 GRE does use the same Navi 48 GPU silicon as the rest of the 9070 series, but is significantly cut down: 3,072 shader cores instead of 3,584 for the 9070 or 4,096 for the 9070 XT; a 192-bit memory interface instead of 256-bit; and 12GB of memory rather than 16GB. It’s not a clear successor to any particular past Radeon card, but its hardware is most similar to the old RX 7700 XT, which launched at $449 in 2023.

The memory is probably the downgrade you’ll feel the most if you’re trying to live with this GPU for a few years. For older and less demanding games, 12GB cards like this and the RTX 5070 are decent options for entry-level 4K if you turn a few settings down and are willing to lean on DLSS or FSR upscaling in a pinch.

But for more demanding games (and future games) you may find that 12GB framebuffer limiting you to 1440p or even 1080p occasionally. It’s certainly true that 12GB isn’t a problem the way that 8GB of GPU memory can be, but offering 16GB of memory was one of the more compelling reasons to pick one of the other 9070 cards over the RTX 5070.

Most Radeons still use reliable old 8-pin power connectors rather than the smaller but sometimes controversial 12-pin connector.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

We’ve also included approximate street prices for AMD’s cards in the table above to keep the 9070 GRE’s $549 MSRP in context. The cheapest 9070s go for $600 to $640, while the 9070 XT will run you between $700 and $740. The 16GB version of the RX 9060 XT starts at around $450, $100 above its original $349 MSRP. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 has seen similar price inflation; new ones start in the $630 to $650 range, up about $100 from the original $549 MSRP. These prices are frustrating, but they’re the numbers to keep in mind if you’re trying to do a “fair” comparison.

Our testbed

Our GPU testbed system remains the same as it’s been for a while now. It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which is more than fast enough to avoid bottlenecking any of these graphics cards. The 9850X3D and 9950X3D2 Dual Edition can very slightly improve game performance in some situations, but the 9800X3D is still the chip to beat for power efficiency and price/performance.

We compared the RX 9070 GRE to a range of AMD and Nvidia cards at 1440p and 4K resolutions. For AMD, we used the two other members of the RX 9070 family, the 16GB RX 9060 XT, a couple of midrange RX 7000-series cards, and the older RX 6800. For Nvidia, we compared with the GeForce RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, and 5060 from the current generation, as well as the RTX 4070 and 4070 Super and the older RTX 3070. We’ve also included Intel’s Arc B580; it’s not really in the same performance category, but it’s Intel’s fastest dedicated GPU.

Performance and power

At 1440p, the RX 9070 GRE is a modest step down from the regular RX 9070; the GRE is generally 10 to 20 percent slower. It’s also around 25 percent faster than the 16GB RX 9060 XT most of the time.

But that small performance dip is enough to make the RX 9070 GRE slower than an RTX 5070, a card the regular RX 9070 can usually beat. The 9070 GRE can sometimes come within striking distance of the 5070’s performance, but in games with ray-tracing turned off, it’s about 10 percent slower, and with ray-tracing effects turned on, it’s about 20 percent slower (worse than that in Black Myth: Wukong, a game that AMD cards just generally seem to struggle with when the settings are maxed). The RX 9070 GRE is closer to an RTX 4070 Super, and even that older card can beat AMD’s new offering at times.

The RX 9070 GRE struggles more at 4K, especially in games with ray-tracing effects enabled. Cyberpunk‘s Overdrive RT preset and Black Myth: Wukong‘s Cinematic preset wouldn’t even run on the card at this resolution, and Cyberpunk‘s Ultra RT preset runs disproportionately slowly compared to the RX 9070 and other cards. A 12GB allotment of RAM won’t be a problem at 1440p most of the time, but even older games at high settings at 4K with ray-tracing effects enabled can give the RX 9070 GRE some trouble. You’ll definitely need to lean on upscaling or reduce your settings to maintain good performance.

The most frustrating thing about the 9070 GRE is that it consumes the same amount of power as the RX 9070 under load (the Cyberpunk result only looks lower because the GPU is being bottlenecked by RAM, so it can’t run as fast as it otherwise could). The card’s power consumption and efficiency aren’t terrible, but they’re way less than the RX 9070 that has already existed for a year. (The RX 9070 GRE has fewer GPU cores but is running them at a higher boost clock, and past a certain point, the power requirements for higher clock speeds are disproportionate to the amount of performance you get in return.)

I’d skip this one

Our review sample was the XFX card, but most versions should perform similarly.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

It’s been a dry year for new GPU releases. Normally, we’d have seen some kind of mid-generation refresh by now (and Nvidia allegedly canceled a Super refresh for its GeForce 50-series cards that would have boosted their RAM allotments). But apart from a few new integrated and entry-level GPUs, there hasn’t been much to talk about since the GeForce RTX 5060 and Radeon RX 9060 XT launched last summer.

But even in our current new-product drought, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE feels like a poor consolation prize. It’s not a terrible performer, and in today’s market, it offers relatively decent performance for its $549 price tag, especially relative to an RTX 5070 that’s selling for $630 to $650. But if you’re already spending this much on a GPU, and if you’re OK with giving up the ecosystem benefits of an Nvidia card (DLSS remains more common than FSR 4, even if FSR 4 helps close the upscaling quality gap), I would encourage you to spend slightly more and step up to the vanilla RX 9070.