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Sometime in the fog of 2021 or 2022, I noticed that my son’s favorite foods changed from 0.9 ounces per bag to 0.8 ounces per bag. Most of them decrease it should fly under the radar, but in this case, I just noticed. It hurt me! This is clear evidence that your money is not flowing like it was recently.
More than a year ago, AMD launched the program Radeon RX 9070 for a retail price of $549. This month, it is launching the Radeon RX 9070 GRE also known as the Radeon RX 9070 GRE at a retail price of $549. This new card (actually a US implementation of a GPU that has been in China for a year or so) has 85 percent more GPUs, 75 percent more memory, and 66 percent more memory than the RX 9070.
We’ll review the RX 9070 GRE in the light of the current GPU market, where prices have been skyrocketing due to AI-driven RAM shortages and price hikes that have made PC building and buying a nightmare over the past few months. But it’s hard not to be a little disappointed by the classic example of GPU shrinkflation – the same money for a much lower-end product.
RX 9070 GRE specifications and speed
| Price of RX9070 XT | Price of RX9070 | Price of RX9070 GRE | Price of RX9060 XT | Price of RX7800 XT | Price of RX7700 XT | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Computational units (stream processors) | 64 RDNA4 (4,096) | 56 RDNA4 (3,584) | 48 RDNA4 (3,072) | 32 RDNA4 (2,048) | 60 RDNA3 (3,840) | 54 RDNA3 (3,456) |
| Boost the Clock | 2,970 MHz | 2,520 MHz | 2,790 MHz | 3,130 MHz | 2,430 MHz | 2,544 MHz |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 650GB/s | 650GB/s | 432GB/s | 320GB/s | 624GB/s | 432GB/s |
| Memory expansion | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 | 8 or 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 |
| Total board power (TBP) | 304 W | 220 W | 220 W | 150 (8GB) or 160 W (16GB), up to 182 W | 263 W | 245W |
I find AMD’s “GRE” documentation more confusing than helpful. “Extra letters” usually means “better,” for both AMD and Nvidia’s GPU models (see XT, Ti, XTX, Super, etc.), but here it means “worse.”
The RX 9070 GRE uses the same Navi 48 GPU silicon as the rest of the 9070 series, but it’s cut down significantly: 3,072 shader cores instead of the 9070’s 3,584 or the 9070 XT’s 4,096; 192-bit memory format instead of 256-bit; with 12GB of memory and not 16GB. It’s not a clear successor to any previous Radeon card, but its hardware is very similar The old RX 7700 XTwhich is set at $449 in 2023.
