Sapphire PULSE AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Review – The Golden Rabbit Returns

AMD’s Ambiguous RX 9000 Series Pricing Strategy Overshadows Launch

It has been over two years since we last looked at a Radeon GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) card, with the Sapphire PURE model that we looked at providing a sensible price/performance ratio. That RX 7900 GRE launched at $569 USD (AMD’s stock MSRP was $549) and had performance a bit higher than the outgoing RX 6950 XT. It was also quite a bit less expensive than the next model up in the lineup, with the RX 7900 XT originally launching at $899 USD.

The new GRE card that we are examining today is also produced by Sapphire, and comes from their PULSE series. These Sapphire PULSE cards are typically offered at AMD MSRP, and offer solid build quality and cooling performance – even if the design is not exactly going to turn heads. We will look at the card itself shortly, but the star of the show is the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE GPU.

The RX 9070 GRE is not new silicon, as it is still based on the Navi 48 GPU, but it’s what is missing that tells the bigger story with this launch. Compared to the RX 9070 this GRE loses 8 Compute Units, has reduced memory speed on a narrower memory bus, and VRAM is also down. But hey, GPU clocks are up.

The full specs can be found in the table below:

The most puzzling part of that table is probably the launch MSRP. We admit that the $599/$549 launch prices of the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 were something of a joke – though it’s possible that AMD offered incentives to get retailers to honor them sometimes. Maybe.

This new GRE variant is being offered at the same $549 USD launch MSRP as the faster RX 9070’s launch MSRP. Make sense? Ok, so the lowest actual price for the non-GRE RX 9070 is $599 right now, making this RX 9070 GRE $50 below the RX 9070 in the real world, rather than the same price. Let this sink in for a moment.

For a savings of a whole $50 (half a tank of gas, essentially), we endure moving down to 18 Gbps (effective) GDDR6 from 20 Gbps, drop to a 192-bit memory interface, lose 8 CUs, and lose 16MB of Infinity Cache. Oh, and it’s a 12GB card, rather than 16GB. Have I convinced to buy the RX 9070, instead? Well, we should see the results first. Maybe the faster clocks will help.

The Sapphire PULSE Card

The PULSE cards are the MSRP-level offering from Sapphire each generation, and they have featured the same understated design language for years now. No, they don’t have flashy looks, but they do have solid build quality and excellent cooling performance, as we will touch on later.

Fans of legitimate PCI-E power cables rejoice – we have a pair of genuine 8-pin connections here!

We can add a list of features for this card, but ultimately it looks and acts just like the last few PULSE cards we have taken a look at.

Some Performance Benchmarks

The last time I reviewed a graphics card we were still using the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, but now we have the slightly faster Ryzen 7 9850X3D on hand, so it made sense to throw out ALL previous test results and start over again with the newer CPU (at least to me, anyway). Enjoy these hand-crafted benchmarks, freshly produced in May of 2026 direct to you from a home office in Michigan.

One note about the odd group of GPUs chosen for comparison testing: We don’t the RX 7900 GRE on hand to test anymore (that one went back to Sapphire), so the similarly-performing RX 6950 XT was re-tested instead. 

We will begin with 3DMark tests, and these are actually pretty interesting for this odd little group of graphics cards.

The Steel Nomad result was a best-case scenario for the RX 9070 GRE, finishing ahead of an RTX 5070 and just behind the RX 7900 XT. In Speed Way the RX 9070 GRE takes a back seat to both the RTX 5070 and RX 7900 XT. Time Spy Extreme is not particularly kind to the new GRE, either.

Moving on to a trio of 2560×1440 game results, and of course we begin with Cyberpunk 2077:

The RX 9070 GRE is faster than the old RX 6950 XT, but so was the RX 7900 GRE two years ago. Let’s hope the next title will improve on this.

In The Talos Principle 2 the 9070 GRE is virtually tied with the RX 6950 XT. Ouch.

Moving on to F1 24:

In this test the GRE improves its position relative to the RX 7900 XT and offers a nearly 18 FPS boost over the RX 6950 XT. So it will really depend on the game.

Next, we will briefly cover power draw and thermals.

The PULSE RX 9070 GRE hit a maximum of 272 watts during the 3DMark Steel Nomad stress test, as measured using PCAT hardware passthrough, though load averages were closer to 240 watts (still not particularly close to the rated 220W TDP).

To improve legibility, the chart above is limited to the first 5,000 samples from the Steel Nomad Stress Test (the rest of the test was identical)

Thermals were outstanding with this PULSE card, with a maximum GPU core temp of just 58 C during the 20x iteration Steel Nomad stress test, with a max hot spot temp of 79.1 C (the room was approximately 22 C during testing). Fans only had to spin up to 1524 RPM max, and the card was, subjectively, very quiet (I did not silence the CPU cooler to get an accurate noise reading).

Final Thoughts

The Radeon RX 9070 GRE helps to better segment the Radeon RX 9000 Series, as the previous lineup had too great a disparity between the Radeon RX 9060 XT to the Radeon RX 9070, but AMD’s pricing (relative to the RX 9070) makes this launch disappointing.

As far as value vs. NVIDIA goes, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE is a respectable alternative to the GeForce RTX 5070 in most of the tests we ran, and, while faster overall, the GeForce card starts at around $629 USD these days. The real competition comes from Team Red itself.

At $549 for this Radeon RX 9070 GRE we are just $50 away from the significantly better Radeon RX 9070 at its current $599 price, so it really doesn’t make sense to go with the GRE unless you are absolutely inflexible with your upgrade budget.