Powercolor Radeon RX 9070 GRE pictured which means the new AMD GPU is probably arriving sooner than we expected but it may be restricted to China

Images of an AMD Radeon 9070 GRE from graphics card maker Powercolor have emerged. Videocardz got hold of some snaps of the card and the box, the former looking a dead ringer for Powercolor's RX 9070 XT card, as pictured above.

Videocardz reckons the new GRE variant will only be available in China at first, but we'll have to wait for the launch to be sure where exactly it will go on sale.

In the meantime, the RX 9070 GRE is based on the same AMD Navi 48 chip as the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, but with some elements disabled. It's rumoured to run 3,072 Stream Processor cores. That compares with 3,584 for the vanilla 9070 and 4,096 for the 9070 XT.

The GRE is also expected to sport a 192-bit memory bus and 12 GB of GDDR6, both of which are a step down from the 256-bit bus and 16 GB of the other 9070 variants.

Consequently, the 9070 GRE ought to be significantly cheaper than the 9070 and 9070 XT, which have MSRPs of $549 and $599, respectively. Of course, you'd do well to buy either card at MSRP currently. It's tricky enough to grab one at all.

So, exactly where the RX 9070 GRE will land in terms of real-world pricing is just about anyone's guess. But it could be priced to take on the new Nvidia RTX 5060 TI, which is MSRP'ed at $379 for the 8 GB version and $429 for the 16 GB option.

You'd expect the 7090 GRE to have the edge over those cards for pure raster performance, but perhaps not for ray-tracing. Path tracing is arguably too big an ask for any card at this price point.

But Nvidia's typically strong feature set, including the ML upgrades that come with its latest DLSS 4 upscaler, not to mention multi-frame generation, means that the choice is rarely as simple as comparing basic raster performance.

Of course, the GRE may end up a China-only GPU, in which case the comparison will be moot in most markets. But we suspect it will make it to global markets at some point.

For now, there's no word on an official launch date. But with product images leaking, it probably won't be too far away.