The Radeon RX 9070 GRE, AMD’s revision of last year’s RX 9070, is only now arriving on our doorsteps because GPU prices are a complete mess. Unlike Nvidia, which boosted the VRAM of its RTX 5070 in response to the ongoing RAM pricing apocalypse, AMD is instead offering a downgrade from its other midrange gaming-ready GPUs at a slightly reduced (though still inflated) price.
Compared to Nvidia, AMD has managed to keep its desktop-grade graphics card prices relatively stable. But its GPUs are still more expensive than they were in 2025, largely due to the memory pricing apocalypse. Gamers looking to upgrade their PC’s graphics performance are stuck between buying a less capable GPU or paying exorbitant rates for something that can handle higher resolutions.
The $550 Radeon RX 9070 GRE is supposed to offer a middle ground between the extremes of price and performance. But first, some background. If you weren’t already aware of AMD’s esoteric nomenclature, you may have assumed this “Great Radeon Edition” was an upgraded AMD Radeon RX 9070. It’s the opposite. AMD’s non-GRE midrange graphics card has 16GB of VRAM and a total of 56 compute units (AMD’s name for its GPU core clusters). The GRE model has 12GB of VRAM and 48 CUs. The GRE card has been available in China since 2025. Starting Monday, it’s now available to U.S. customers as well. The chipmaker is even selling the GRE for the same $550 launch price the original 9070 had when it launched in 2025.
AMD offered Gizmodo the chance to test the $550 GPU before launch, so I decided to stick this 12GB graphics card inside a PC geared toward 1440p gaming. The system in question was running a last-generation AMD Ryzen 7 5800XT CPU and 32GB of RAM. This is the kind of desktop tower AMD is explicitly targeting. This week, the company debuted a 10-year anniversary edition of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the best AM4 gaming CPU, explicitly billed for gamers who can’t afford more modern RAM on a new motherboard.
The Radeon RX 9070 was AMD’s GPU geared toward 1440p gaming, with the promise that in some less-demanding games it could push all the way to 4K. That card had 16GB of VRAM, meaning it was better for handling higher resolutions on demand. The 12GB GRE version is, simply put, less capable.
Compared to the lower-end Radeon RX 9060 XT, the 9070 GRE is an obvious upgrade. It managed 31% higher scores on benchmarks like 3DMark’s “Speed Way” and did 28% better scores on 3DMark’s “Port Royal.” The latter test indicates that this version of the 9070 is still much, much better at handling ray tracing.
The roughly $450 9060 XT with 16GB of VRAM was touted for 1440p gaming at launch. When you compare the 5070 GRE for gaming purposes, there’s essentially no contest. I tasked each card with Cyberpunk 2077 on Ray Tracing Ultra graphics settings at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions. You can probably guess which one won.
Whereas the 9060XT can get roughly 30 fps in Cyberpunk at the higher resolution, the 9070 GRE touts 40 fps. If you rely on FSR 4 upscaling (for those games that actually support it, unlike the recent 007 First Light), you can easily play games like this at close to 80 fps. A game like Black Myth: Wukong is unplayable on the 9060 XT if you decide to push ray tracing to the max and eschew upscaling. You can attain a stable 30 fps on the 9070 GRE. The benefits end if you start comparing the 12GB 9070 to the 16GB version. The impact is minimal, but the 9070 is more capable if you want to aim for 4K.
So what the RX 9070 GRE does is straddle the line between the company’s other 1440p-centric card, the RX 9060 XT with 16GB of VRAM, and the RX 9070. That’s true in both performance and price. While GPU prices continue to fluctuate day by day, I can trawl through Best Buy and Newegg listings and find RX 9060 XT GPUs for around $450. That’s $100 more than the card’s original suggested retail price. An RX 9070 is similarly inflated to around $600.
You could make a good argument that the 4GB of extra VRAM is worth $50. Sure, but that thought assumes we’ll continue to see stock of the 16GB model. That’s effectively what has happened to Nvidia’s RTX 5070. An MSI-made 12GB Nvidia RTX 5070 costs $670 at Best Buy. The original 5070 with 8GB of VRAM had a suggested retail price of $550. In 2026, any GPU you buy will be a compromise.
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