We’ve been talking about the RX 9070 GRE for a long time now. But this time, we have its first test in hand. And as expected (and hoped), it cleverly slots in between the RX 9060 XT and the classic RX 9070 in AMD’s Radeon range. Originally designed primarily for the Chinese market, this graphics card is positioned as an ideal reference for 1440p enthusiasts. There’s still much speculation about the card’s arrival on the European market, and in North America, rumors point to a launch in the later part of this year. It is currently only available in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. For testing purposes, we chose a Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 GRE Pulse Gaming OC Metal. It cost €800 to import, including customs and transport. A price tag that would be unrealistic today.
RX 9070 GRE: Promising on paper, but…
In terms of specs, it features the Navi-48 chip, with 48 computing units, i.e. 3,072 FP32 stream processors. It offers 12 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 18 Gbps on a 192-bit bus, and its power consumption is 220 W, like its big sister RX 9070. The price? Not yet official, but it’s positioned in the mid-range, probably between its neighbors. For 1440p gaming, it delivers, with 29% more fps than the RX 9060 XT 16GB in rasterization, and 17% in ray tracing. Compared with the RX 9070, it loses 14% in rasterization and 25% in ray tracing. While this new GRE retains some of the DNA of its larger siblings, its overclocking potential could bring it closer to the 9070.
RX 9070 GRE: Vram is its Achilles heel
All in all, this card is closer to the Radeon RX 9070 than to the Radeon RX 9060 XT. If we stop there, that’s the expected positioning, and it looks positive. But there’s more: the Achilles’ heel of this card is its limited 12 GB VRAM. This significantly affects the RX 9070 GRE in certain games. These games still spare the RX 9070 and RX 9060 XT(16GB), both of which have 16GB. This is particularly noticeable in games using ray tracing. In these conditions, performance sometimes drops considerably compared to the RX 9070, putting the 9070 GRE barely above the RX 9060 XT 16GB.
