During the fog of 2021 or 2022, I noticed that my son’s favorite brand of fruit snacks had dropped from 0.9 ounces per pouch to 0.8 ounces per pouch. Most shrink inflation tends to fly under the radar, but in this case, I noticed it. felt terrible! This is solid evidence that your money is not going away as much as it was in the recent past.
Almost a year ago, AMD launched the Radeon RX 9070 at a suggested retail price of $549. This month, it’s launching the eponymously named Radeon RX 9070 GRE at a suggested retail price of $549. This new card (actually the US launch of a GPU that’s been available in China for about a year) has 85 percent more GPU cores, 75 percent more memory, and 66 percent more memory bandwidth than the regular RX 9070.
We’ll evaluate the RX 9070 GRE in the context of the current GPU market, where prices are rising due to the AI-driven RAM shortages and price gouging that have made PC building and buying such a bad experience for the past few months. But it’s hard not to be a little upset about such a clear example of GPU shrink inflation – the same money for an obviously inferior product.
RX 9070 GRE specs and speed
| RX 9070 XT | rx 9070 | rx 9070 gray | RX 9060 XT | RX 7800 XT | RX 7700 XT | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units (Stream Processors) | 64 RDNA4 (4,096) | 56 RDNA4 (3,584) | 48 RDNA4 (3,072) | 32 RDNA4 (2,048) | 60 RDNA3 (3,840) | 54 RDNA3 (3,456) |
| boost clock | 2,970 mhz | 2,520 mhz | 2,790 mhz | 3,130 mhz | 2,430 mhz | 2,544 megahertz |
| memory bus width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 128 bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 650GB/s | 650GB/s | 432GB/s | 320GB/s | 624GB/s | 432GB/s |
| memory size | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 | 8 or 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 |
| Total Board Power (TBP) | 304 w | 220w | 220w | 150 (8GB) or 160W (16GB), up to 182W | 263 w | 245 w |
I find AMD’s “GRE” label more confusing than helpful. “Extra letters” in both AMD and Nvidia’s GPU lineups (see XT, TI, XTX, Super, etc.) usually mean “better,” but in this case, it means “worse.”
The RX 9070 GRE uses the same Navi 48 GPU silicon as the rest of the 9070 series, but has been cut down significantly: 3,072 shader cores instead of 3,584 for the 9070 or 4,096 for the 9070 XT; 192-bit memory interface instead of 256-bit; And 12GB of memory instead of 16GB. It’s not an obvious successor to any particular previous Radeon card, but its hardware is similar to the older RX 7700 XT, which launched in 2023 for $449.
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