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.
The Radeon RX 9070 GRE is surgically targeted to land in the wide-open performance gap between the RX 9060 XT and the RX 9070 for Radeons and the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5070 for GeForces, and it does exactly that for $549 as it arrives Stateside.
Wait, you might be saying. Didn’t the RX 9070 already launch at $549? Indeed it did, but outside of Prime Day events and holiday sales, we’ve rarely seen those cards available at that price. And the ongoing chip-pocalypse has durably spiked graphics card prices well above MSRP across the board, keeping $549 9070s a rare sight.
Even before the AI gold rush made all consumer tech more expensive, the past couple of years have shown that MSRPs are basically hopes and dreams without the supply to back them up, and that’s a headache that’s affected both AMD and Nvidia to varying degrees. Witness the consistently elevated prices of the RTX 5070 Ti, the RTX 5080, and the RTX 5090 even before the AI crunch.
But AMD was perhaps unreasonably aggressive with the promised pricing of the 9070 and 9070 XT given how rarely those products have been seen at MSRP. A 12GB card with a heavily cut-down die like the 9070 GRE would seem to offer a stronger price anchor, and as the distant player two in PC gaming graphics right now, AMD needs to give buyers a big, loud reason to pay attention.
At $479, the RX 9070 GRE would be the single best value in gaming by our calculations, period. But the realities of today’s market and AMD’s partner relationships probably limit the room for such a splashy sticker, given how much downward pressure it would place on the GDDR6-intensive RX 9060 XT 16GB. As things stand, the $549 MSRP makes the 9070 GRE the third-best value in gaming right now, after the RX 9070 and RTX 5070.
So what are you getting for that money? As a baseline, the GRE delivers a roughly 90 FPS 1440p raster experience, and that’s a solid place to be before you add FSR 4 upscaling and framegen to the mix. But if you got a $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT back in the day, you’re already enjoying a similar experience. And with a version of FSR 4 for RDNA 3 cards coming soon, there’s little reason for midrange RX 7000 owners to consider a jump.
Looking further back, the 9070 GRE is a strong upgrade for owners of the five-year-old RX 6700 XT and its 6750 XT refresh, both of which are now on the wrong side of 60 FPS at 1440p in our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing. It delivers much better raster and RT performance, a vastly improved accelerated media engine, and official FSR 4 upscaling and framegen support, all of which will give RX 6000-series upgraders a much more modern and enjoyable gaming, streaming, and media transcoding experience.
The 9070 GRE might also tempt RTX 3070 owners that are struggling within the confines of that six-year-old card’s 8GB of VRAM. But the universal availability and generally superior image quality of DLSS upscaling and the added performance boost of DLSS MFG means that AMD will probably have a hard time convincing GeForce gamers to switch to an RX 9070 GRE versus an RTX 5070.
The two major drawbacks of this card lie in its 12GB of VRAM and, consequently, its RT performance at resolutions higher than 1080p. If you’re a fan of ray tracing and you’re considering this card, you will want to pay close attention to the availability of FSR 4 upscaling and ML Frame Generation or support for their overrides in any game you’d like to play. Those technologies will help mitigate the potential issues caused by 12GB of VRAM for memory-hungry RT titles.
But if you’re really serious about RT, we’d strongly recommend spending less than $100 more and getting an RTX 5070. It not only provides better baseline performance all around but also offers the one-two software punch of DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Dynamic MFG for effortless performance tuning, as well as Ray Reconstruction in some titles. You also avoid the annoying AMD lockout for path tracing in the latest Capcom releases like Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata.
All told, the RX 9070 GRE is a strong midrange graphics card that gives buyers a useful step up between the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 9070 (and the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070). We’d much rather have this product as a lifeline for PC gaming than the long-rumored-to-be-reintroduced RTX 3060 12GB, which is well past its sell-by date by every measure at our disposal.
But we still think that AMD could have truly changed the midrange game by going even cheaper than the GRE's $549 MSRP, given its performance and software ecosystem limitations compared to GeForces. At its listed price, we'll have to see whether the 9070 GRE offers enough of a hook to get buyers to bite.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
