A Radeon RX 9070 GRE With 33% More VRAM May Be Coming Soon
After releasing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, a cut-down version of the regular Radeon RX 9070, to the Chinese market, it's said AMD is readying a revised model that will bring more VRAM to the table. It's not clear if any other changes will be made, but if the unofficial information proves accurate, the newer model will feature 16GB of GDDR6 memory just like the regular Radeon RX 9070 we reviewed.
The Radeon RX 9070 GRE that currently exists sports 12GB of VRAM, so a jump to 16GB would represent a 33.3% increase. It also features a narrower bus width at 192-bit versus 256-bit on the standard 9070, resulting in substantial lower memory bandwidth—432GB/s on the Radeon RX 9070 GRE versus 644.6GB/s on the regular Radeon RX 9070.
AMD's changes didn't stop at the memory and bus width configuration. It also scaled back the number of compute units and shading units to 48 and 3,072, respectively, compared to 56 CUs and 3,584 shading units on the non-GRE model.
Other changes include fewer texture mapping units (192 versus 224), fewer render output units (96 versus 128), less ray-tracing cores (48 versus 56), and a few other differences, such as less L3 cache (48MB versus 64MB).
The rumored upgrade to the VRAM allotment comes from a post on Board Channels.
"The latest news on AMD's new graphics card product planning reveals that the RX9070 GRE series currently only has a 12MB memory model. To meet market demand, AMD will upgrade the memory capacity and may upgrade this series product line in the future. It is understood that AMD is planning to upgrade the RX9070 GRE model, possibly directly to 16GB," the Board Channel post reads, as spotted by Videocardz (we don't have access to Board Channels, so we haven't seen it for ourselves).
As for a possible time frame, the post claims it will launch sometime between September and October, which is right around the corner.
Chatter on Boards Channel about alleged products doesn't always end up being true, so as always, add a pinch of salt to the rumor.
In addition to a possible bump in VRAM, however, the other interesting thing to keep an eye on is if AMD introduces a GRE variant to the U.S. market. That's not unprecedented. To wit, AMD launched its last-generation Radeon RX 7900 GRE in China before making it available in the U.S. market. We even reviewed ASRock's Steel Legend model.
