AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Performance Results Are in: It's like 7900 GRE, but a Bit Better

AMD hasn’t said much about the RX 9070 GRE, which is mostly targeted at the Chinese market, but performance results have sneaked out anyway after a German publication put it through its paces. The card performed around what you’d expect it to: It beat the RTX 4070 and 7900 GRE by a few percent points but fell behind the RTX 5070 and RX 9070.
AMD introduced the “GRE” moniker with its RX 7000 series, with the 7900 GRE. Originally called the “Great Rabbit Edition” to celebrate the Chinese New Year, it later became the “Great Radeon Edition” when it received a wider release. It’s not yet clear whether AMD plans to launch the 9700 GRE to a wider audience, but if the price is right, it could find a place in the rest of the RDNA4 lineup.
In testing at PC Games Hardware and ComputerBase (via VideoCardz), they found that the 7900 GRE has 3,072 stream processors, or around 14% less than the RX 9070. To help make up that shortfall, the boost clock is 11% higher, but there’s also just 12GB of VRAM, running at a slower speed with a narrower 192-bit memory bus. It still has a TDP of 220W, though.
The end result is weaker performance than the RX 9070 by around 16% across a range of games at 1440p (focusing on standard rasterization rather than ray tracing). In the amalgamated results, it’s just 3% faster than the 7900 GRE and 6% behind the RTX 5070.
Unfortunately, performance falls further behind in ray tracing as AMD’s RT accelerators still aren’t quite a match for their Nvidia counterparts. There, the RX 9070 GRE falls behind the standard RTX 4070 by 3%, and is 12% behind the RTX 5070. It showcases improvements inter-generationally, though, as the lead over the 7900 GRE extends to 5% when raytracing is involved.
In other tests, it became clear that the 12GB of VRAM was more of a limiting factor in this card’s performance than anything else, as it fell notably behind cards with more memory in some more demanding games.
None of this really matters for Western markets for now, as the 9700 GRE isn’t currently planned for a release outside of China. Indeed, that’s probably why it has the same 220W TDP as the RX 9070, despite weaker performance—it’s less efficient silicon sent to a market where export controls are growing ever tighter.
However, the 7900 GRE eventually made its way to outside markets, so we may see the same here in due course. If it did, the 9070 GRE would slot well into AMD’s lineup as a better-than-9060 XT GPU, though it might struggle in more demanding VRAM games. Price, as always, would be the kicker.
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