AMD's China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE may be coming to global markets

Last year, AMD launched the Radeon RX 9070 GRE in China with a starting price of 4,199 yuan. Like other GRE cards before it, the launch was China-exclusive. However, rumors now suggest that AMD may be preparing to launch the graphics card globally.

Videocardz has obtained a picture of the English box art for a Sapphire Pulse version of the card, which immediately stands out since Sapphire typically uses Chinese product names for its China-market cards.

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Adding weight to the rumor, Videocardz has also spotted Newegg listings for prebuilt systems featuring the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, alongside unofficial listings for the card itself. The PULSE and PURE RX 9070 GRE models are both listed on Newegg, though these are currently from Chinese third-party retailers rather than official US distributors. This suggests that these GPUs are already available to distributors and system integrators in the US.

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AMD introduced the GRE suffix with the RX 7000 series, originally standing for Golden Rabbit Edition to mark the year of the rabbit. It now stands for Great Radeon Edition. The RX 9070 GRE uses the same Navi 48 XL GPU found in the 9070 XT and 9070, but cut down to 3,072 stream processors across 48 compute units. Memory is trimmed to 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, down from the 16GB and 256-bit bus of the higher-end cards, which run at 18 Gbps. TDP sits at 220W, matching the standard RX 9070.

Benchmarks show the Radeon RX 9070 GRE performing 28.4% faster than the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB and 22.4% ahead of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. This makes it a very compelling middle-ground option if AMD gets the pricing right.

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That said, AMD has done this before with the RX 7900 GRE, which started as a China-exclusive before eventually reaching global markets. Whether the same path is being taken here or AMD is simply looking to clear inventory ahead of another launch is harder to say. The RX 9070 XT is already seeing significant price corrections globally, falling near MSRP in the UK and hitting record lows in Japan, suggesting AMD may be making room on shelves.