GoKawiilThe Radeon RX 9070 GRE gives gamers a reasonably attainable path to high-refresh-rate 1080p and 1440p raster performance in 2026's wild graphics market. But its deeply cut-down GPU and 12GB of VRAM sometimes hold it back, especially in RT gaming at resolutions higher than 1080p.
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
It's a grim time to be a PC gamer and enthusiast, as anybody who has spent any time making a build list well knows. The AI gold rush has made practically everything that goes into a PC more expensive as LLMs and agentic workflows conspire to grab every available square millimeter of logic, memory, and storage wafers the world over.
For all that, here we are at Computex 2026 with a fresh graphics card review. AMD is bringing its formerly China-only RX 9070 GRE (aka “Great Radeon Edition,” neé Golden Rabbit Edition) to global markets. This card has been available in the Chinese market for about a year, but AMD has decided that now is the time to bring the GRE to the wider world.
And here it is, launching at the same $549 in the USA that the RX 9070 ostensibly listed for. That's sure to cause some double-takes, but times have obviously changed since the 9070 arrived a bit over a year ago.
In today's wild graphics market, prices on what we might call "entry-level enthusiast" cards with large memory capacities have gotten out of whack with the performance levels they deliver. The $349 RX 9060 XT 16GB is now selling for closer to $450, and the $429 RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is now closer to $570. The RX 9060 XT might be situationally recommendable at that price, but the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is clearly DOA.
And higher-end cards that would formerly have served as true midrange products are more expensive, too. The $549 RX 9070 sells for closer to $650, as does the RTX 5070.
So there's currently a wide gap in the graphics market for enthusiasts who want strong enough performance for high-refresh-rate gaming at both 1080p and 1440p without spending a dollar more than they need to, and AMD sees an opportunity for the RX 9070 GRE to fill it.
For a quick refresher, the RX 9000 series uses the RDNA 4 graphics architecture, AMD’s first to include dedicated matrix math accelerators for AI tasks like upscaling and frame gen. RDNA 4 also boasts improved RT units that claim up to a 2x improvement over the RDNA 3 CU. RDNA 4 also includes a much-improved media engine that can encode and transcode video quickly with much higher image quality than past Radeon products.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
... continue reading