Much cheaper and much faster than an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, the RX 9070 GRE is the only sub-MSRP graphics card around today
With the recent ludicrous price increases we've seen across Nvidia's graphics cards it's become clear that, for PC gamers looking to get the most frame rate bang for their buck, an AMD GPU is the only silicon worth the money right now. And the Radeon RX 9000-series family is also the only one of the current generation to be able to offer a pretty high-end graphics card for under its MSRP.
I give you, once more, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, a 12 GB card you can pick up today for just $520 at Newegg. The one minor caveat is that you will need to have a Newegg account to be able to see the full discount—just enter the email address you use to create the free account and you'll see an extra $50 lopped off the original $570 price tag.
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The most obvious Nvidia-shaped competition for AMD's most recent RDNA 4 GPU is the RTX 5070 12 GB and the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB. And the absolute cheapest (and trustworthy) prices I've found for those two GeForce cards are $725 and $570 respectively. The RTX 5070 is generally the more performant card, offering slightly higher frame rates. But that's the key here; the frame rate delta is pretty small, especially when you start to bring in upscaled 1440p performance into the picture.
Upscaled gaming performance
Avg FPS
1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB
95
82
RX 9070 | 16 GB
111
96
RTX 5070 | 12 GB
107
81
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB
86
72
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB
78
69
| Product | Value |
|---|---|
| RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB | 95 Avg FPS, 82 1% Low FPS |
| RX 9070 | 16 GB | 111 Avg FPS, 96 1% Low FPS |
| RTX 5070 | 12 GB | 107 Avg FPS, 81 1% Low FPS |
| RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB | 86 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS |
| RX 9060 XT | 16 GB | 78 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS |
There are a couple of instances where, when using upscaling, the RX 9070 GRE takes a healthy lead in terms of frame rates over the RTX 5070.
You can also see in those benchmarks the level of gaming performance you can get out of an RX 9070 GRE compared with the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB card, too. And this is before we get into one of the very neatest tricks of the latest Radeon architecture: its undervolting performance.
Pare back the amount of voltage given to the GPU and it will run cooler. Perhaps counterintuitively, providing lower voltage directly to the Navi 48 chip actually results in higher performance because the card is running cooler and therefore the dynamic nature of current day clock speeds means that they are able to push further. On a pretty standard RX 9070 GRE I was easily topping 3 GHz as standard, delivering another 10% higher frame rates with an overclocked card that's only marginally warmer and a little more power hungry.
Undervolting performance
Avg FPS
1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem
69
42
RX 9070 GRE | Stock
62
55
RX 9070 | Stock
73
64
RTX 5070 | Stock
68
60
| Product | Value |
|---|---|
| RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem | 69 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS |
| RX 9070 GRE | Stock | 62 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS |
| RX 9070 | Stock | 73 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS |
| RTX 5070 | Stock | 68 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS |
With a super-easy undervolt, the RX 9070 GRE is able to post performance on par or beyond the RTX 5070, and alongside the straight RX 9070.
I feel it's also worth noting at this point that both the prices I've noted for the RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB are absolute best case prices, with those $725 and $570 figures being very much the outliers when it comes to general pricing for those GPUs. Most listings you'll find for the pair will have them both far closer to the $800 mark.
Which is frankly offensive. So, if you really don't want to go for an AMD card for whatever reasons you feel important, then your best chance to pick a moderately powerful Nvidia GPU for under $600 is going fast. The Walmart deal below has been around for a week now, but is listed as very low in terms of stock, so might have even gone by the time you read this.
Personally, I would 100% recommend getting the RX 9070 GRE over the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB. The Nvidia GPU may have more memory to hand (so if you're more into local AI than local death match it's got a better return) but in terms of gaming performance the Radeon card easily outpunches its rival.
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.