AMD RX 9070 GRE Review ft. Sapphire

1. Introduction2. Meet the Sapphire RX 9070 GRE Pulse3. Testing Methodology4. Alan Wake II5. Assassin's Creed Shadows6. Clair Obscur: Expedition 337. Cyberpunk 20778. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach9. Final Fantasy XVI10. Forza Horizon 611. Horizon Forbidden West12. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II13. A Plague Tale: Requiem14. Resident Evil Requiem15. Starfield16. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)17. Cost Per Frame Analysis18. Ray Tracing: Alan Wake II19. Ray Tracing: Assassin's Creed Shadows20. Ray Tracing: Black Myth: Wukong21. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207722. Ray Tracing: Doom: The Dark Ages23. Ray Tracing: Forza Horizon 624. Ray Tracing: Resident Evil Requiem25. Ray Tracing: Star Wars Outlaws26. Ray Tracing Performance Summary27. GPU Temperatures28. Memory Temperatures29. Acoustics30. Power Draw: 1080p31. Power Draw: 1440p32. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)33. Performance per Watt: 1080p34. Performance per Watt: 1440p35. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)36. Closing Thoughts37. View All Pages

Here we present frame rate figures for each graphics card, averaged across all 12 games on test today. We use the geometric mean instead of the arithmetic mean for overall performance, given it provides a more accurate and balanced representation of GPU performance across different games.

Overall performance of the RX 9070 GRE is probably about as expected given the specs. It has 14% fewer cores than the RX 9070, and funnily enough, at 1440p it is 14% slower on average, while it is some 31% faster than the RX 9060 XT. It generally trades blows with the RTX 5070, but is 6% slower on average and we didn't see any games where it offered a meaningful performance improvement over the GeForce card.

To illustrate that, we've broken down performance of the RX 9070 GRE, relative to the RTX 5070, at 1440p. Across all 12 games tested, it was at best 2% faster than the 5070 – in Forza Horizon 6, as it happens – but that is close enough where the results are functionally identical. On the other hand, 7 of the 12 games tested saw the GRE come in at least 5% slower than the 5070.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a capable 1440p-class GPU, but as we will come to later in the review, the price-to-performance ratio could well need adjusting…

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