If you’re reading this anywhere outside of China, you probably haven’t seen the Radeon RX 9070 GRE. Because like previous GRE cards (“Golden Rabbit Edition/Great Radeon Edition” if you were wondering) it’s just for mainland China and may or may not come to other territories.
But Adam got curious, so he imported one to test anyway—specifically, a Sapphire card of the 9070 GRE with 12GB of memory.
So, what’s the difference between this card and the version of the 9070 XT you see elsewhere? Theoretically, it should be below the 9070 base card (the non-XT version, very strangely) and above the 9060 XT 16GB. Yes, it’s the lowest of the AMD 9070 cards.
Adam tested it versus the previous-gen RX 7900 GRE, Nvidia’s RTX 5070, the standard RX 9070, and the 9060 XT 16GB.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the card fits in between the 9060 and base 9070 in most benchmarks. But the last-gen 7900 GRE card is actually beating it out in many benchmarks, because it wins out on a lot of specs like shader units, ROPs, TMUs, and RT cores, with the 9070 GRE hoping to make it up with 96 tensor cores. That holds true in most office, AI, and pure raster game benchmarks.
The newer card pulls ahead from the older generation when it comes to ray tracing performance. In games like Black Myth Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024, the 9070 GRE gets closer to the base 9070 thanks to its tensor cores. So it might make sense as a purchase if you run a lot of more recent games with the latest and greatest graphics goodies. But you still might want the 16GB version of the 9060 XT for better future-proofing… though that’s a hard call to make.
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