We didn’t expect any new graphics cards to drop at Computex this year, but AMD gave us one anyway, designing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE ($549) to fill the gap between its Radeon RX 9070 and the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB. It has less RAM than either of these existing Radeon cards, but a substantially more powerful GPU than the RX 9060 XT. We tested out ASRock’s AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Steel Legend 12GB OC to get an idea of what an RX 9070 GRE can do. While it isn’t the fastest midrange card, it’s certainly speedy enough that you should think twice before buying something else at above MSRP. Still, the midrange graphics card to beat remains the Editors' Choice-winning AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT.

Design: Navi 48 Returns

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE is new to the US, but it is not an entirely fresh design. The chipmaker first released the RX 9070 GRE in China last year. AMD's decision to bring it to the US likely stems from rising memory costs, which have in turn driven up graphics card prices. With high-bandwidth memory costs in the clouds, we're more likely to see more of the same GPUs with different core counts or RAM allocations than brand-new graphics silicon for consumers while this crisis persists.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The RX 9070 GRE uses the same Navi 48 graphics chip as AMD’s more potent Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT cards. Creating computer chips is an imperfect process, and only Navi 48 chips that are nearly flawless go on to become RX 9070 XT cards. Flawed chips have their defective components disabled, and then AMD repackages them into stratified GPU performance tiers for sale at gradually lower prices.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Navi 48 has 64 compute units in total, seen in the RX 9070 XT. AMD reduced this to 56 compute units on the RX 9070, while the RX 9070 GRE has just 48 compute units available. This reduction also shrinks the 9070 GRE's shader, TMU, ROP, ray accelerator, and AI accelerator counts compared with the RX 9070 or RX 9070 XT. You can find the exact count of each of these resources in the chart below:

Alongside the reduction in execution resources, the 9070 GRE also has a narrower memory interface than the 9070 and 9070 XT. Both of those have 256-bit wide memory interfaces, but AMD reduced the 9070 GRE's to be 192 bits wide, which also cuts the card's memory capacity from 16GB to 12GB. While having more memory can be beneficial in games, this decrease in capacity should make the 9070 GRE cheaper to produce—something every silicon manufacturer wants right now.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The RX 9070 GRE carries the same MSRP as the Radeon RX 9070 at $549. This doesn’t take into account the rise in memory costs, which have driven up most graphics card prices. At the time of publication, many RX 9070 GPUs sell for significantly above MSRP, with some priced above $700. The least expensive RX 9070 I can find is on sale at Best Buy, marked down from $709 to $599. The 9070 GRE, with less RAM and fewer shaders, might have a better chance of staying consistently available at $549.

ASRock AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Steel Legend 12GB OC: Vendor Card Details

The ASRock AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Steel Legend 12GB OC is the Radeon RX 9070 GRE model that we received for review. It features a large triple-fan thermal solution and comes with a fairly hefty factory overclock. Instead of operating at 2,200MHz with a turbo of 2,790MHz, as AMD’s reference design calls for, ASRock clocked this model at 2,340MHz with a turbo of 2,920MHz. That's a 4.65% increase on the turbo clock, which is larger than we often see for a factory overclock.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This model has three DisplayPort 2.1a connections and a single HDMI 2.1b port on its rear I/O panel, along with two 8-pin power connections on its side.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Test Setup and Competition

We benchmarked the ASRock AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Steel Legend 12GB OC on our current graphics card testbed, which features an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. This CPU sits on a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard with two 16GB DDR5 RAM sticks in a dual-channel configuration, using an AMD EXPO memory profile to set the RAM to 6,000MHz. We cool the CPU with a Cooler Master liquid cooler.

We’ve also configured the system with two 2TB Crucial PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. One's dedicated to holding games, the other to holding Windows 11 and everything else. A 1,500-watt Corsair HX1500i power supply delivers electric current.

The Radeon RX 9070 GRE competes directly with AMD’s own Radeon RX 9070 and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, all of which carry the same $549 MSRP. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is the next card below the RTX 5070 in Nvidia’s current graphics card lineup, and it too proves somewhat competitive with the RX 9070 GRE.

Synthetic Tests

Synthetic tests are designed to produce scores for comparison, but they don't necessarily reflect the hardware's real-world performance. This dynamic is particularly true for all 3DMark tests, but the numbers are still interesting to compare. The Unigine Superposition test provides more specific information about how well-optimized the card is for the DirectX and OpenGL APIs.

In four of the 3DMark tests (Port Royal, Solar Bay, Steel Nomad, and Time Spy Extreme), the RX 9070, RX 9070 GRE, and RTX 5070 scored relatively similarly to each other. Which of these three had the highest score varied from one 3DMark test to the next, but the difference between the three was marginal or a tie in many of these tests. The 3DMark Speed Way test showed the RTX 5070 with a commanding lead over the RX 9070 GRE, and the screen optimization test showed the opposite, with the 9070 GRE scoring more than double what the RTX 5070 scored with DLSS and FSR off. Regardless, these scores don’t really tell us much about how the two cards will perform in games.

The RTX 5070 was clearly ahead in Unigine’s Superposition benchmark. It’s interesting to see that the Nvidia RTX 50-series cards generally performed better with DirectX than with OpenGL, while the AMD competition tended to perform about equally well with either API. The RTX 5070 was ahead of the RX 9070 GRE using either API, though.

UL Procyon AI Text Generation tests

UL’s Procyon benchmark is one of the first we have that can measure AI performance on hardware components. This test provides only a glimpse at the hardware’s ability to run AI workloads, though. Applications for AI workloads can use numerous different AI models. Still, this test at least gives us a general idea of how well the tested hardware performs text generation with a few popular large language models.

The RX 9070 GRE has fewer AI accelerators compared with the RX 9070, and this shows in these AI workloads, with the 9070 GRE clearly behind the 9070 as well as the Nvidia competition. AMD’s AI hardware appears to be less powerful in general, but it could be that AMD’s AI hardware just isn’t proficient in this type of AI workload.

Content Creation Tests

Using a graphics card to accelerate content creation tasks can make a night-and-day difference in your PC’s performance in these tasks. We use Adobe Premiere Pro 24 and Blender to test how well each card performs on this type of work.

The RX 9070 GRE and the RTX 5070 fought it out in the Adobe Premiere Pro test, but the RX 9070 GRE and all other AMD cards fell far behind while running the Blender benchmark. If you need to do content creation work on your PC, you would probably be better off sticking with an Nvidia card.

Screen Optimization Tests With Black Myth: Wukong

Screen optimization technologies such as AMD’s FSR, Intel’s XeSS, and Nvidia’s DLSS are becoming increasingly common in modern games. The use of these technologies can help you to boost your game’s frame rate at the cost of reduced image quality and increased latency. Testing these technologies against each other is somewhat disingenuous, as each technology functions differently. Different versions of these technologies further complicate this issue and support specific games. For these reasons, we have limited our testing of these technologies to Black Myth: Wukong, as that game requires one of them to be enabled. This test provides limited insight into how these technologies compare.

The RTX 5070 outpaced the RX 9070 GRE in Black Myth: Wukong with frame generation disabled. Here, the 9070 GRE performed just slightly better than the RTX 5060 Ti. Enabling frame generation helped AMD cards like the RX 9070 GRE more than Nvidia cards, enabling the 9070 GRE to overtake the RTX 5070.

Game Tests Utilizing Ray Tracing

A graphics card’s gaming performance is unquestionably its most important characteristic, and these tests focus on determining just how well a card performs when running modern games using ray-traced lighting techniques.

The RX 9070 GRE lagged behind the RTX 5070 in Cyberpunk 2077, just as it did in Black Myth: Wukong. The RX 9070 GRE’s 4K performance here is likely an error due to a driver bug, but the 9070 GRE was clearly behind the RTX 5070 at 1080p and 1440p, too. Other than the 9070 GRE’s likely erroneous 4K score, the 9070 GRE outpaced the 5060 Ti by healthy margins.

ASRock's 9070 GRE performed better while running F1 2024. In this test, it was faster than the RTX 5070 except at 4K, where they tied. The two cards also performed similarly in Far Cry 6 across the board, tying again at 4K.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora showed the RTX 5070 far ahead of the RX 9070 GRE. The 9070 GRE came closer to matching the RTX 5060 Ti here, though it was a bit faster. The results we gathered from Returnal also mirrored this dynamic, with the 9070 GRE a little ahead of the RTX 5060 Ti, but with the RTX 5070 past the 9070 GRE by a wider margin.

Out of the games we tested, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE performed best in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. It undoubtedly outperformed the RTX 5070, and it even surpassed the costlier RTX 5070 Ti.

Rasterization-Only Game Tests

Most games today support ray tracing, but not all do. Similarly, almost all modern graphics cards have ray-tracing hardware, but how powerful it is can vary. The ray-tracing hardware can also bottleneck the rest of the card in some tests, as seen with AMD’s Radeon RX 7000-series cards. By testing games that lack ray tracing support, we can gain deeper insight into how the graphics hardware performs across different test scenarios.

The results from Total War: Three Kingdoms and Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed essentially the same thing. In these tests, the RX 9070 GRE scored almost directly between the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5060 Ti, regardless of resolution.

Power and Thermals Tests

We measure the consumption and thermal performance of each graphics card during specific tests to estimate how much power each will draw and how hot it will get. Power consumption is measured at the wall using a Kill-A-Watt power meter, which displays the test bed's total power consumption for each test. As only the card changes between tests, this gives us a rough idea of how much power each card consumes relative to other cards we have tested. We conduct the thermal tests using CPUID’s Hardware Monitor utility, which is specific to each card.

The RX 9070 GRE's power consumption during the Adobe Premiere Pro test was slightly lower than that of the RTX 5070. It was significantly worse in Blender, given the 9070 GRE’s dramatically lower performance in that test. Power consumption in games was relatively close between the RX 9070 GRE and the RTX 5070, with the RX 9070 GRE using just a hair less juice.

The thermal solution on the ASRock AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Steel Legend 12GB OC performed excellently in our tests, with the card never getting that hot. It stayed far cooler than the competing Nvidia models, though this will vary by model.