AMD has officially launched its China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) graphics card, with reviews now revealing how this RDNA 4-based GPU stacks up against competitors. The new card aims to fill the performance gap between the RX 9060 XT and RX 9070, offering an alternative in the increasingly crowded mid-to-high-end GPU market.
Performance Benchmarks Show Parity with Last-Gen Models
Reviews from multiple Chinese outlets indicate that the RX 9070 GRE delivers performance nearly identical to the previous-generation RX 7900 GRE. This comes as a surprise to some analysts who expected the newer architecture to provide at least a modest improvement over its RDNA 3-based predecessor. In synthetic and gaming benchmarks alike, the two cards perform within margin of error of each other, with the RX 9070 GRE showing similarity scores of approximately 100.8% compared to the RX 7900 GRE.
Competitive Positioning Against NVIDIA
When compared to NVIDIA's offerings, the RX 9070 GRE falls approximately 5% behind the GeForce RTX 5070 in overall performance. This gap varies by application, with some games showing near-identical performance and others demonstrating up to a 20% advantage for the NVIDIA card. However, the AMD card maintains a significant 27% performance lead over the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, which positions it firmly between these two NVIDIA options in the product stack.
Ray Tracing Capabilities Show Improvement
One surprising aspect highlighted in reviews is the RX 9070 GRE's ray tracing performance. While AMD has traditionally lagged behind NVIDIA in this area, the new card shows competitive results in titles like Assassin's Creed: Shadows and F1 24, where it matches the RTX 5070. Only in Cyberpunk 2077, a title that has historically favored NVIDIA's architecture, does the GeForce card maintain a clear advantage. This suggests AMD has made meaningful progress in ray tracing optimization with its RDNA 4 architecture.
Technical Specifications and Memory Configuration
The RX 9070 GRE features 3072 Stream Processors and 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM on the same NAVI 48 die used in the standard RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. This represents a memory downgrade compared to the RX 7900 GRE, which offers 16GB of VRAM. For users working with memory-intensive applications or future-proofing their systems, this 4GB difference could be a significant consideration despite similar gaming performance.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Specifications:
- GPU: NAVI 48 die (RDNA 4 architecture)
- Stream Processors: 3072
- Memory: 12GB GDDR6 VRAM
- Price: 4,199 RMB (China only)
Performance Comparisons:
- vs RX 7900 GRE: Approximately equal (100.8% similarity)
- vs RTX 5070: About 5% slower
- vs RTX 5060 Ti 16GB: About 27% faster
- vs RX 9070: Approximately 15% slower
Pricing and Value Proposition
Priced at 4,199 RMB in China (approximately USD $580), the RX 9070 GRE sits about 14% higher than the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB's 3,599 RMB (approximately USD $497). This pricing strategy has raised questions about the card's value proposition, especially considering it delivers performance similar to the previous generation. While AMD hasn't announced global availability, speculation suggests that if released worldwide, it would need to be priced under USD $500 to be competitive, given that the standard RX 9070 retails for USD $549.
Performance Gap with Standard RX 9070
Perhaps most notable is the significant performance gap between the GRE variant and the standard RX 9070. Reviews indicate approximately a 15% performance difference between these two cards, which is larger than expected given their technical similarities. This substantial gap, combined with the relatively small 5% difference between the RX 9070 GRE and RTX 5070, suggests that AMD has carefully segmented its product lineup to avoid cannibalizing sales of its higher-end offerings.
Market Implications and Future Outlook
As a China-exclusive product, the RX 9070 GRE follows AMD's strategy of creating region-specific variants, similar to what it did with the RX 7900 GRE. However, the previous GRE model eventually saw global availability, raising questions about whether history might repeat itself. With AMD set to release the RX 9060 XT at Computex to compete directly with the RTX 5060 Ti, the company is clearly working to establish a comprehensive product stack across all price points in the competitive GPU market.