AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE review: $549 GPU fails to impress
▼ Summary
– The author noticed their son’s fruit snack pouch shrank from 0.9 to 0.8 ounces, illustrating shrinkflation where consumers get less for the same money.
– AMD launched the Radeon RX 9070 GRE at the same $549 price as the RX 9070, but with fewer GPU cores, less memory, and lower memory bandwidth.
– The RX 9070 GRE uses the same Navi 48 silicon as the 9070 series but is significantly cut down, with 3,072 shader cores, a 192-bit memory interface, and 12GB of memory.
– The “GRE” label is confusing because it usually means “better” in GPU naming, but in this case it means “worse” than the standard model.
– GPU prices are rising due to AI-driven RAM shortages, making the RX 9070 GRE a clear example of “GPU shrinkflation” for the same price.
At some point during the GPU shortage of the early 2020s, I noticed that my son’s fruit snack pouches had quietly shrunk from 0.9 ounces to 0.8 ounces. Most shrinkflation is designed to go unnoticed, but this one caught my eye. It felt disappointing,tangible proof that your money doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.
Now, AMD is serving up a similar feeling in the graphics card market. Just over a year ago, the company launched the Radeon RX 9070 with a suggested retail price of $549. This month, it’s releasing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE at the same $549 price point. This new card, which is essentially the US debut of a GPU that’s been available in China for about a year, delivers only 85 percent of the GPU cores, 75 percent of the memory, and 66 percent of the memory bandwidth found in the standard RX 9070.
We’ll assess the RX 9070 GRE within the context of today’s GPU market, where prices have been creeping upward due to AI-driven RAM shortages and price hikes that have made PC building a frustrating experience for months. Still, it’s hard not to feel a bit irritated by such a clear example of GPU shrinkflation,paying the same amount for a noticeably inferior product.
RX 9070 GRE specs and speeds
| Model | Compute Units (Stream Processors) | Boost Clock | Memory Bus Width | Memory Bandwidth | Memory Size | Total Board Power (TBP) | |——-|———————————–|————-|——————|——————|————-|————————-| | RX 9070 XT | 64 RDNA4 (4,096) | 2,970 MHz | 256-bit | 650GB/s | 16GB GDDR6 | 304 W | | RX 9070 | 56 RDNA4 (3,584) | 2,520 MHz | 256-bit | 650GB/s | 16GB GDDR6 | 220 W | | RX 9070 GRE | 48 RDNA4 (3,072) | 2,790 MHz | 192-bit | 432GB/s | 12GB GDDR6 | 220 W | | RX 9060 XT | 32 RDNA4 (2,048) | 3,130 MHz | 128-bit | 320GB/s | 8 or 16GB GDDR6 | 150 (8GB) or 160 W (16GB), up to 182 W | | RX 7800 XT | 60 RDNA3 (3,840) | 2,430 MHz | 256-bit | 624GB/s | 16GB GDDR6 | 263 W | | RX 7700 XT | 54 RDNA3 (3,456) | 2,544 MHz | 192-bit | 432GB/s | 12GB GDDR6 | 245 W |
I find AMD’s “GRE” label more confusing than helpful. Typically, “extra letters” signal an upgrade in both AMD and Nvidia lineups,think XT, Ti, XTX, or Super. In this case, though, “GRE” means worse.
The RX 9070 GRE does use the same Navi 48 GPU silicon as the rest of the 9070 series, but it’s heavily cut down. It features 3,072 shader cores instead of 3,584 for the 9070 or 4,096 for the 9070 XT. Its memory interface is a 192-bit bus rather than 256-bit, and it comes with 12GB of memory instead of 16GB. This card doesn’t fit neatly as a successor to any specific past Radeon model, but its hardware most closely resembles the old RX 7700 XT, which launched at $449 in 2023.
(Source: Ars Technica)
