If you haven’t noticed yet, it’s a pretty bad time to buy hardware, PCs and anything that needs RAM. You can thank the AI companies for that. AMD has one potential fix for gamers, though: offer older gear. At Computex this year, the company revealed that it’ll bring back its popular Ryzen 7 5800X3D chip, and also make the Radeon RX 9070 GRE card available globally after launching in China last year. With a suggested retail price of $549, it’s currently more affordable than last year’s RX 9070, which launched at the same price but now sells for upwards of $600.

After testing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE — which stands for “Golden Rabbit Edition” — I can confirm it performs closely to the RX 9070. These GRE versions are typically lower-specced GPUs that AMD sells in China. If retailers can actually keep its price close to $549, it’s one of the few semi-affordable options for decent 1440p gaming (with a dash of ray tracing). But if that price still sounds too steep to you, it may be worth waiting until next year to see how the hardware market fares.

There was nothing special about the ASRock RX 9070 GRE I tested — it’s just a simple GPU cooled by three large fans — so I’ll just get straight to the specs. It features 12GB of VRAM that’s slower than the 16GB of memory in the 9070, and it also has eight fewer compute units and ray tracing accelerators. That’s a major reason why AMD can offer it for less than the 9070. The company tries to make up for the reduced hardware by bumping up the 9070 GRE’s boost speed, which can hit up to 2.79GHz, compared to the 9070’s 2.52GHz.

In 3DMark’s Speedway test, which is currently the company’s most demanding benchmark, the GRE card scored 4,334, significantly less than the standard RX 9070’s 5,799. The GRE GPU was more competitive in older 3DMark tests, scoring around 700 points lower than the 9070 in Steel Nomad and just 200 points less in Timespy Extreme. That’s a sign that older games will perform far better on the 9070 GRE, compared to newer titles.

That being said, the 9070 GRE also ran well in Forza Horizon 6, averaging 180 fps in 1440p with the “RT High” setting and AMD’s FSR4 frame generation turned on. Without frame generation, it reached around 90 fps. I was also surprised that the 9070 GRE could handle a bit of 4K gaming: It averaged 80 fps in Forza with the same “RT High” preset. The game looked great in both resolutions, with enough ray traced reflections and HDR highlights to make my QD-OLED monitor shine, and I didn’t notice any performance stuttering. (Forza did warn that my video memory was running low, but I didn’t encounter any issues.)

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Oddly enough, the Radeon 9070 GRE performed better in the Geekbench 6 compute test, compared to the 9070. That could be due to driver refinements, or some advantages from running at a higher clock speed. For the most part, though, you can just think of it as a lesser 9070. That may make the GRE edition better-suited for small cases: Under load, its core temperature reached just 58C, and I could barely hear the fans spinning. The card also cooled down quickly to 30C after stopping an intensive game or benchmark.

Given the times we’re in, I can’t easily recommend that you run out and buy the Radeon RX 9070 GRE. But if you’re in desperate need of an upgrade, and you can’t wait until next year, it’s a solid choice for midrange 1440p gaming.