I'm likely not the first to tell you that the memory crisis has really done a number on PC gaming, but nothing quite exemplifies this like AMD releasing a graphics card with 4-8 GB of VRAM in 2026. That card is called the RX 9050; it starts at $279, and it is limited to certain regions. One early review suggests performance isn't great, but its specs are looking a little funky.

That review is from Japanese hardware outlet Hermitage Akihabara, which managed to get its hands on an 8 GB-toting ASRock model. Testing the card in 3DMark, Hermitage argues it "falls short of the 30fps generally considered the benchmark for comfortable single-player gameplay. Furthermore, its performance is only about 75% of that of its competitor, the GeForce RTX 5050, and just over 60% compared to the higher-end Radeon RX 9060 XT" (machine translated).

The RX 9050 doesn't lag behind the RTX 5050 in absolutely all tests, though. The RX 9050 matches the RTX 5050 in 4K testing on Rainbow Six Siege X, and it performed better in Doom Eternal at 1080p and 1440p, though this was with the help of FSR, which is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, the RTX 5050 wipes the floor with the RX 9050 in pretty much every other test conducted by Hermitage.

At 1080p, Hermitage saw 192.4 average fps in Apex Legends, and 147 average fps on the 9050. In Cyberpunk, on Ultra, Hermitage saw an average of 142 fps on the AMD card and 240 fps on the Nvidia card. In fairness to AMD, though, this is with both cards using the frame generation and upscaling models of their respective cards, so not a 1-1 comparison.

With the RTX 5050, and its 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, launching at $250, that means that the RX 9050, according to these tests, is substantially slower than the Nvidia card. Of course, that's assuming you can get one at MSRP, but we can't assume you will find AMD cards at MSRP either.

The RX 9050's score of 4531 in 3D Mark's Port Royal and 1873 in Speed Way places the RX 9050 close to the RTX 3070, as noted by hardware analyst Harukaze5719. They also note a specs page with 32 ROPs on the card, which is half of the advertised 64 on AMD's own specs page. Fewer ROPs, or Render Output Units, in a card means worse performance, and that would be reflected in tests.

We saw a similar problem with eight missing ROPs in some RTX 50-series cards around their launch, which Nvidia claims only affected 0.5% of cards. If this s a defect in the tested card, one might expect better real-life performance.

That's assuming those ROPs are actually missing and it's not a defect in the software reporting itself, or some other problem in between. That's all to say that while early figures for AMD's latest budget card aren't looking very good, we'll have to wait for some more real-world testing from other outlets to see if it actually is so thoroughly outpaced by the RTX 5050.

Either way, early signs aren't looking great for the budget card market. That's especially true when you consider the AMD price increase rumours that dropped just today.

Earlier this month, we noted that AMD was reportedly bumping the price of its GPU and VRAM bundles for its partners. Now it seems like that bump will be at least 10%.

That is according to industry analyst Harukaze5719, who has shared a report stating as such, claiming "information confirmed by AMD's internal supply chain". The report claims AMD finalised plans to increase the supply price of GPU and VRAM bundles but did not yet commit to it due to a "weak recovery phase in the consumer graphics card market, high price sensitivity at the end-user level, existing inventory still needing to be digested, and the fact that NV (Nvidia) series graphics card prices have not yet increased." (machine translated).

As you might be able to guess from that wording, Nvidia just yesterday reportedly implemented its own price bump, going as high as an extra 30%. Apparently AMD will implement a price increase of "at least 10%, and all brands will officially implement the price increase uniformly starting next month. At that time, the price positioning is expected to be similar to that of NV series graphics cards."

One thing worth noting here is that a price increase to partners does not necessarily mean that the same price increase will be passed to the consumer. However, if other partners follow suit, there's little reason for companies to eat the cost themselves. Especially given AIB partners' margins are apparently quite slim.

And though the price increase will not affect the base cost of cards that partners already have access to, a price increase might make them less likely to get rid of their inventory at their current price point. As noted in our Nvidia story, some Nvidia partners are in a "state of panic, reluctant to sell."

If you're wondering why AMD and Nvidia are in a state where they feel they have to raise prices, you can blame AI for that one. AI and the vast amount of data it needs for training are sucking up all of the memory, and taking components like SSDs and GPUs with it. And this is a shame, as graphics cards have been relatively stable in pricing for the past few months, according to our tracker of the best graphics cards deals.

Unfortunately, the worst news here is that the memory crisis is unlikely to end soon. Just yesterday, Samsung claimed in its earnings call that "the supply constraints are expected to become even more severe in 2027 than 2026, reinforcing our view that the supply shortage will persist through 2028. Beyond 2029, it is hard to say because of more limited visibility."

So, it's currently a bad time to build a PC, and it seems likely it will become even worse, and we don't know when things will get better. That's the unfortunate reality of the memory crisis.

Despite the memory crisis continuing to rage, Nvidia graphics card prices have been relatively stable over the last 20 or so weeks, until Nvidia appeared to have raised the price of GPU kits for AIB partners last week. Now, it seems like that price increase is up to 30%.

This is according to the Taiwanese outlet, Economic Daily News, which claims Nvidia is raising the prices of its GPU bundles (the GPU and memory) by between 20–30%. This is set to affect both GDDR6 and GDDR7. The report claims that graphics card distributors in China are in a "state of panic, reluctant to sell".

Industry analyst Harukaze5719 places the price of the Chinese market exclusive RTX 5090 D at $3,843 and the RTX 5080 at $1,845, the latter just short of the MSRP of the RTX 5090 at launch. The RTX 5090 was already suggested to have received a price increase back in May, so, if proven true, this would be the third Nvidia price increase this year.

Naturally, Nvidia raising the prices of the components doesn't mean partners have to follow suit, but it's very unlikely they will eat that extra cost. If a graphics card partner can match that price increase and still sell the cards, it will.

A major problem with the graphics card market right now is the cost of VRAM to go inside the card. With the memory crisis ongoing, prices have only gone up, and chips are becoming harder to purchase. That's likely some of the rationale behind AMD launching a 4 GB RX 9050 this week. And why the likes of memory manufacturers SK hynix and Samsung have just reported record profits.

There were rumours late last year that Nvidia might stop bundling VRAM with GPUs, but that only really solves the problem for Nvidia. Partners would still have to source their own memory, which could be a problem for more budget-oriented cards and less well-known partners.

Graphics cards are already in a pretty ugly place. We round up the best graphics cards deals every week, and the best RTX 5090 deal currently sits at $4,200 over at Walmart, with the best price for a RTX 5080 being $1,250 at Amazon.

With the memory crisis not expected to end until at least 2029, it seems like it will only get harder and more expensive to build that gaming PC you've been pining after.

AMD has launched a new graphics card, the RX 9050. This is an entry-level graphics card with a slim provision of cores and VRAM, more of a match for the 890M than the RX 9060. It's even more entry-level than initial rumours suggested, and while you'd hope for a great price to match, we're not getting our hopes up yet.

Take a look at the specifications below, right from AMD's website, and you'll get an idea of the card. It's using the same Navi 44 GPU as the more capable entry-level and mid-range graphics cards, but it's been trimmed down to within an inch of its life. At 1,024 cores, it is actually a match for the 890M GPU found in Strix Point mobile chips, though it does have the big benefit of a desktop power budget, even if only 92 watts; RDNA 4 architecture, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache.

Compared to previous rumours, which my colleague Jacob Fox called "quite strange" when we published a story about them in May, it's a lot less capable than expected. Look to the TFLOPs for a more holistic view of what's going on, and the RX 9050 is actually rated to half the performance of the RX 9060. Bear in mind, TFLOPs does not directly correlate to game performance, but it's a general idea of what to expect.

It's tough to judge a graphics card without knowing the price. ASRock is the only partner to announce availability for the RX 9050, launching its own RX 9050 Challenger 8 GB card. There's no clear price for the card yet and it's set to launch only in LATAM and Asia Pacific.

The card may end up being more OEM-only elsewhere. The RX 9060 is OEM-only. Only Best Buy has the card for sale so far, inside a CyberPower gaming PC for $890. This includes an RX 9050 4 GB among its shoestring specification.

Yeah, 4 GB.

What's that about? The AMD website only lists an 8 GB model, though that listing is only talking about a "Max Memory Size" of 8 GB, while earlier rumours had suggested a 4 GB model would be part of the range. ASRock also only talks about an 8 GB model.

So is this CyberPower listing incorrect? I'd love to think so, but it may well be the case that there's an even slimmer 4 GB model for OEMs. If that's the case, it's no surprise then that AMD isn't shouting about it to the world. That's a pitiful amount of memory for 2026—AMD actually rallied against 4 GB cards back in 2022.

"Competitive products at a similar entry level price-point are offering up to a maximum of 4GB of VRAM, which is evidently not enough for today's games," AMD said in a blog post. "Go Beyond 4GB of Video Memory to Crank Up your settings. Play on Radeon RX Series GPUs with 6GB or 8GB of VRAM and enjoy gaming at Max settings."

Let's just hope this 4 GB thing is a typo and any plans to release such a card have been brushed aside.

With the RDNA 4 architecture under the hood, the RX 9060 will at least have some benefits over older cards. The full FSR Redstone feature set is supported by RDNA 4, including Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration. Though we tend to find frame generation works best when the card is able to deliver a good amount of frames to begin with, which this card may struggle to do in the latest games. At least FSR 4 is natively supported, including FP8. This card might need it.

Update

AMD has sent over the following information regarding the new card, including the price and availability for the card.

The driver also includes support for the new AMD Radeon™ RX 9050 graphics card, which expands the Radeon™ RX 9000 Series portfolio with an affordable option that brings the latest AMD RDNA™ 4 gaming technologies to mainstream gamers in the APJ and Latin American markets at a SEP of $279 USD.

The Radeon RX 9050 is designed for responsive gameplay at 1080p in popular esports and modern AAA titles. This highly efficient, drop-in upgrade features a 92W TBP and fully supports the latest AMD FSR Technologies, next-gen raytracing, and high-quality AV1 video streaming.

Radeon RX 9050 key specs:

Architecture: AMD RDNA 4

Compute Units: 16

VRAM: 8GB GDDR6

Game Clock / Boost Clock: 1.92 GHz / Up to 2.60 GHz

TBP: 92W

To learn more about the Radeon RX 9050 GPU, and the Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards, click here.

I've not tested the card but I'd take a guess as to say that's a steep price tag for the expected performance. Especially compared to the Arc B570/B580 and GeForce RTX 5050. The RTX 5050 comes with 33% fewer cores than the RTX 5060, whereas the RX 9050 has 42% fewer cores to the RX 9060. It's half that of an RX 9060 XT—it's not half price, though.

This info also suggests it's not ASRock that's limiting this card to Asia Pacific and Latin America. AMD is doing the same.

There's also news on whether there's a 4 GB version. Hassan Mujtaba from WCCFTech says on X that they spoke to AMD and confirmed the 4 GB version is real and OEM-only. There are no plans to sell it outside of OEM systems.

It seems we can't catch a break lately when it comes to PC gaming hardware. All thanks to the global memory shortage, of course. Now, according to information Benchlife claims to have received, Nvidia is raising prices for its GDDR6 as well as GDDR7 GPU kits.

That means the RTX 5050 and some RTX 40-series cards (using GDDR6) might not be safe from the hikes, in addition to the rest of the RTX 50-series (using GDDR7). Though there's no mention over whether any pricing changes would hit all regions.

Benchlife says prices were already raised for the RTX 5090 (and its China variant) in May, which fits with what we heard at the time. This recent adjustment is for other GeForce products.

Assuming the information is correct, it will mean AIB partners—the companies you buy non-Founders cards from—will now have to pay Nvidia more for the respective kits which come with both GPU and memory.

It's not the wildest speculation to say that such price increases will be due to rising memory costs. No one—not even Nvidia, and certainly not its AIB partners—is immune from it. Memory is just in such astronomically high demand thanks to the AI boom.

In fact, on this point a source reportedly told VideoCardz that high 3 GB GDDR7 pricing has made Nvidia put its 50-series Super cards on hold. Originally we were expecting those late this year, or perhaps early next year, but apparently the high cost for the memory has put a big pin in that.

As you can see from the below chart outlining the GPU prices we've been tracking, prices have actually been pretty stable for the past few months. But it sounds like there's a chance this could change before long.

Lowest price per GPU

Lowest pricing (Price, $)

Week

Nvidia RTX 5080Nvidia RTX 5070 TiAMD RX 9070 XTAMD RX 9070Nvidia RTX 5070Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBNvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8 GBAMD RX 9060 XT 16 GBAMD RX 9060 XT 8 GBNvidia RTX 5060Nvidia RTX 5050Intel Arc B580Intel Arc B570AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE

Lowest pricing Data

Timestamp (Week)	Nvidia RTX 5080 (Price, $)	Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti (Price, $)	AMD RX 9070 XT (Price, $)	AMD RX 9070 (Price, $)	Nvidia RTX 5070 (Price, $)	Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB (Price, $)	Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB (Price, $)	AMD RX 9060 XT 16 GB (Price, $)	AMD RX 9060 XT 8 GB (Price, $)	Nvidia RTX 5060 (Price, $)	Nvidia RTX 5050 (Price, $)	Intel Arc B580 (Price, $)	Intel Arc B570 (Price, $)	AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE (Price, $)
1	1100	780	700	600	550	430	368	370	280	300	250	260	230	N/A
2	1099	750	700	600	550	430	340	370	270	300	250	260	230	N/A
3	1000	750	700	550	524	430	370	370	280	291	250	250	230	N/A
4	1000	750	695	550	546	430	345	370	280	296	250	250	230	N/A
5	1000	749	670	600	481	430	340	350	270	300	250	250	230	N/A
6	929	749	670	600	499	379	340	350	270	289	240	250	230	N/A
7	999	750	650	550	520	430	350	350	270	299	240	250	230	N/A
8	980	749	650	550	500	430	342	350	270	299	250	250	200	N/A
9	999	750	650	560	500	430	323	350	270	299	250	250	220	N/A
10	989	730	600	550	480	430	340	360	270	299	250	250	210	N/A
11	990	699	600	550	489	400	320	340	250	280	230	250	200	N/A
12	989	730	600	530	500	400	320	350	275	279	220	250	200	N/A
13	1000	750	600	530	527	420	342	350	280	279	220	250	200	N/A
14	1000	750	600	530	540	420	313	370	280	279	220	250	202	N/A
15	1000	749	600	530	499	430	350	380	288	279	200	240	202	N/A
16	1100	750	620	530	499	430	350	380	288	270	200	240	202	N/A
17	1230	750	660	580	549	430	330	390	310	260	235	250	200	N/A
18	1268	829	700	580	540	450	330	390	310	290	240	250	200	N/A
19	1380	899	720	580	549	450	330	400	310	299	240	260	200	N/A
20	1350	1000	720	600	620	520	330	440	310	299	240	290	200	N/A
21	1365	950	730	590	620	520	351	440	350	299	260	290	250	N/A
22	1365	950	730	630	620	520	360	400	346	299	260	300	250	N/A
23	1290	950	730	630	630	520	360	440	346	340	260	300	250	N/A
24	1290	950	730	620	625	520	360	440	346	340	260	300	250	N/A
25	1250	950	730	610	630	550	360	440	346	349	260	300	250	N/A
26	1260	950	730	610	604	550	360	440	340	349	290	300	250	N/A
27	1290	950	730	630	640	570	360	440	340	349	290	300	250	N/A
28	1250	900	720	620	630	515	390	440	346	349	290	290	250	N/A
29	1290	990	710	620	636	500	390	449	350	349	290	290	250	N/A
30	1290	990	710	620	630	500	390	440	350	330	290	290	260	N/A
31	1290	990	670	620	599	500	380	440	350	330	290	290	260	N/A
32	1290	990	710	620	599	515	380	430	360	310	290	290	260	N/A
33	1290	980	710	600	599	490	400	430	360	349	290	290	260	N/A
34	1270	980	710	620	599	550	380	440	360	349	290	290	260	N/A
35	1290	900	700	600	599	550	380	430	360	350	290	304	260	N/A
36	1250	980	700	600	599	550	370	440	360	340	290	300	260	550
37	1250	980	700	600	599	570	370	440	350	340	290	304	250	550
38	1250	980	700	600	599	570	370	440	350	340	290	304	250	550
39	1250	920	700	600	599	570	330	400	360	340	290	298	250	500
40	1250	955	700	600	599	565	330	430	360	340	290	291	260	500
41	1250	900	700	600	560	560	330	430	360	339	290	290	250	500

We've been measuring the lowest available price of each current-gen GPU since August 14, 2025.

As with much in this interrelated industry, it's difficult to say when things like price increases for AIBs will start to show in the consumer market. These AIBs might have some back-stock to get through and they might be able to eat some of the price increase themselves to keep stocks low.

Although it's worth noting that might not be possible, given warnings we've already heard AIBs give about slim margins—such is the reason EVGA gave for it leaving the GPU market, and that was way before the memory crisis.

It's often not smart to have too much back-stock, anyway, as the market tends towards being very 'lean' with 'just-in-time' manufacturing and sales. If you sit on too much stock it could end up going to waste and then you've lost money. Having a lean inventory of stock is how even big memory makers operate, according to a supply chain expert I interviewed back in May.

For companies more towards the end of the supply chain like AIB partners, this means they'll likely have to raise prices for their customers (us) before long too. We've just seen Framework, for instance, say that it's going to have to do just this because one of its suppliers has raised its prices for memory "far beyond anything we had predicted".

Nvidia will probably have a better time of it, of course, with much bigger contracts and more ability to weather the storm. But if the GPU kit price increase info is correct, it seems that storm might be taking a toll.

Behold, Anti-sag temperature indicator and ticking time bomb from r/pcmasterrace

For a nervy PC Gamer such as myself, cracking open your gaming rig for even a spot of light dust busting can feel like you're flirting with danger. Well, one Redditor has decided to laugh in the face of danger by using a tube of gallium to stop their GPU from sagging.

Philip_777 shared their unusual anti-sagging intervention, describing it as both a "temperature indicator and ticking time bomb." For those a little unclear on why this is such a bad idea, allow me to share some of my recent education on the subject.

Gallium has a super low melting point, meaning that it will revert to liquid form if you attempt to hold it in the palm of your hand. Apparently, gallium can also 'eat' other metals, like aluminium. In other words, a gallium leak inside of your PC would be a very bad, no good time.

Philip_777 has taken some precautions by confining the gallium in what I'm hoping is a sturdy plastic vial. They write in a follow up comment, "It shouldn't become brittle or anything. I think it was HDPE [High-density polyethylene]. Still one of those moments where you know it's safe, but there's still a chance for it to go south somehow."

Obviously, if you want to avoid GPU sag there are other options besides risking an embrittling gallium leak inside of your PC. Should simply installing your GPU in a vertical position not be an option, GPU brackets of all shapes and sizes are not hard to find.

Besides a funny Reddit post, Philip_777 explains why they elected to dance with death instead, writing, "It was the only thing I found that had almost the perfect height. And since then I haven't bought one of those fancy anti-sag brackets."

To be fair to the Redditor, some GPU support brackets like this one with a screen from Zalman are needlessly extra (and pricey as a result). But I also just found this adjustable GPU support device for a fiver on Amazon. Alternatively, you could 3D print one of your faves to hold up your graphics card (like Goku about to drop a Spirit Bomb). I suppose there's no accounting for taste (says the girl who would absolutely love to have Miku Hatsune holding up her rig's GPU).

There are many things that I would do to my graphics card—undervolt it, treasure it, sing it lullabies—but I probably wouldn't slap a gigantic heatsink on it just to eliminate the fan. Don't get me wrong, passive cooling is nice, but I'm glad I don't have to DIY it myself, creating the monstrosity I've just seen over on Chinese video platform Bilibili (check the top comment).

The mod, re-posted by FanlessTech and reported by Videocardz, is slapped on top of an RTX 4060 GPU, and according to Google's machine translation you can message the Bilibili user for the schematic if you so wish.

Judging by a photo of the parts sitting on some scales, the heatsink weighs 2.56 kg (5.64 lbs), which makes sense considering it absolutely dwarfs the RTX 4060 PCB it's fitted to.

You're not looking at your usual GPU heatsink here, as these are some ginormous riveted fins that are very spread apart. The DIYer has the Frankenstein card socketed into a dinky little motherboard next to some RAM and another fanless cooler for the CPU. It makes quite the peculiar scene.

If there were ever a relatively recent GPU to give the fanless treatment, it would be the RTX 4060. It has just a 115 W TDP. The RTX 5060, for context, has a TDP of 145 W, and the RTX 5090 (just for funsies) has a TDP of 575 W.

You'll want a low TDP for a fanless design because, as good as they can be, they won't be as good as active cooling at keeping temps low. They also won't save you much power, as it only takes a handful of watts to power some GPU fans. They will, however, be quieter, and that's the reason you'd go for it.

I'm just not sure that's worth the whopping space trade-off, here. Still, a cool project.

Hot off the news that repair shops have gained access to leaked internal Nvidia tools to gather RTX 50-series hotspot data, CPUID's HWMonitor has added its own hotspot thermal tracking info in the latest update.

Version 1.65 adds two hotspot sensor data rows within the graphics card column for RTX 50-series cards, right underneath the traditional GPU and memory average temperature data. This should make it easier for users to diagnose whether their card is suffering from dried out thermal paste and pads, or a mis-contacted cooler.

The hotspot temperature will naturally be higher than the regular GPU temp reading under load, so don't panic if you see some elevated figures. Personally, I'd only become concerned if the hot spot temps were alarmingly high, combined with the GPU cooler fans spinning like a small tornado and the gaming performance dropping like a stone.

All that being said, I gritted my teeth and decided to check out the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC Edition's hotspot temps while running Crimson Desert at 4K with path tracing enabled, just to give myself a worst-case scenario. Oh, and there's a heatwave on in the UK at the moment, and my house has no air conditioning. Perfect test conditions!

As you can see from the results below, while the GPU sat comfortably at around 62-63 °C on average, HWMonitor recorded a brief hotspot spike into the mid-80s, although settled down to a 75-80 °C temp afterwards.

I'm fairly comfortable with that, as I've benched this card many times and its performance is right in line with other RTX 5070 Ti data we have to hand. It's quiet as a mouse, too. Should the hotspot temps ever soar off into the stratosphere, though, I'll be having the cooler off in a heartbeat to check out the conditions underneath.

The devs behind CapFrameX, a very useful free performance monitoring utility, have also announced that RTX 50-series hotspot temps will be coming to its tracking features soon. So hey, more ways to keep an eye on your machine. And let's face it, we all like a bit of PC hardware watching, don't we?

Nvidia's RTX 50-series cards have a tendency to run cool and quiet. On average, at least. The current generation of Nvidia GPUs were previously claimed to have had their hotspot sensor removed, which lead to limited temp readings in real-time monitoring tools like GPU-Z, as only the regular GPU and memory temperature data is available.

However, Brazilian modding and repair channel Paulo Gomes claims to have gained access to hotspot measurements on RTX 50-series GPUs via MODS, or Nvidia Modular Diagnostic Software, an internal Nvidia tool that appears to have leaked to some repair channels and Discord servers (via Techpowerup).

By the seems of it, RTX 50-series GPUs do in fact have a hotspot temperature reporting sensor, but it's disabled at a driver level on boot. The Nvidia MODS tool bypasses the driver restriction, allowing users to see the exact hotspot temperature, making it easier to diagnose a misaligned cooler or improper application of thermal paste.

Which is what Paulo Gomes has been doing in order to diagnose RTX 50-series cards with abnormal gaming performance and high fan noise, due to thermal throttling.

In the given example, a Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti was reporting an average temperature of around 68 °C , but had an actual hotspot maximum temp of 107 °C due to poor cooler contact. After replacing the thermal paste and ensuring the cooler was correctly fitted, the hotspot temperatures dropped to 100 °C, resulting in much better performance.

Given the sheer number of AIB coolers strapped to Nvidia's latest efforts, it's no surprise that some become victims to poor implementation of thermal interface material. That being said, it's not the first Gigabyte thermal paste-related issue we've been made aware of.

As to why hotspot data is blocked in the first place for RTX 50-series cards? No idea. Many Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs have passed through our hands since release, and we've not had issues with poor performance (relative to expectations) or thermal problems with any of them.

Still, the MODS tool is said to be out there, floating within the murky world of Discord. Be careful with what you download though, yes? There's nothing worse than getting an unintentional dose of malware to compound your PC issues, let me tell you.

If you're rockin' a current-gen AMD graphics card, there are yet more hints that multi frame gen (MFG), ie, frame gen that promises more than 2x frame rate, could soon be with us. 'Soon' is relative, of course, especially in the case of AMD, but detective work by a user on the Chinese forum Chiphell has revealed the presence of FSR MFG ratios up to 8x hidden in recent drivers (via Wccftech).

The user discovered the setting in the RadeonTuner tool, which hooks into the official AMD driver and provides a different app on top. This app, crucially, can present things in the driver that the regular AMD Adrenalin app might not yet give you access to. Things such as the FSR ratio drop-down.

To be clear, we already knew that MFG was probably being worked on by AMD, because earlier this year there was mention of "frame generation ratios" in documentation for the ADLX API. This implied that game developers were now being allowed to tinker with frame generation ratios, which implies the existence of ratios above 2x. In other words: multi frame gen.

Now, we have more confirmation of this, and not only that, but (A) it's seemingly in the actual drivers rather than just SDK documentation, and (B) the ratio maxes out at 8x. For reference, Nvidia's Multi Frame Gen maxes out at 6x.

As someone who uses an AMD RX 9070 XT as my daily driver, I am keenly aware of just how long it's taken AMD to implement promised technologies that Nvidia has already long been able to deliver. Technologies, that is, like multi frame gen, not to mention the latest upscaling and frame gen technologies in general, in more than a smattering of games.

The RadeonTuner tool also seems to show FSR Ray Regeneration and Neural Radiance Caching overrides, which will presumably allow us to override a game's settings to force FSR ray reconstruction and neural caching for better ray tracing.

I can't help but wonder, though, whether AMD users would rather more adoption of the latest FSR technologies we already have, such as regular 'Redstone' ML-powered frame gen and upscaling. There have been improvements on this front of late, though, with the technologies being allowed via driver-level overrides even for previous-gen AMD GPUs.

I also can't help but wonder how 8x frame gen will work in practice. I know for my part, I struggle to deal with the latency of even 3x or 4x frame gen on Nvidia cards. But I'm particularly sensitive to latency, so maybe 8x frame gen will have its place.

Stara škola električara - najbolja from r/SerbiaGaming

It's never nice to have to replace your old hardware, but with the memory crisis in full swing, it has become more and more painful to watch old hardware break down. That's why it's particularly nice to see people save their old hardware with a little ingenuity, and one Redditor's dad used a whole heaping of it recently.

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, user External_Length_8877 took to the SerbiaGaming subreddit recently to share that their dad ripped a capacitor from an old radio to replace the broken one in their RTX 3070, saving 12,000 dinars (around $115) in the process.

In the process, the dad also swapped out the thermal paste for one used on high-voltage lines, and the original poster claims, "Now it runs better than before the repair."

The only downside so far is that the capacitor from the radio is bulkier than the original capacitor, so it now hangs outside of the GPU. That means you can see it noticeably on the side, and it also means it may struggle in a super tight case, but one can expect some hits to performance if your parts are super cramped anyway.

The Redditor claims the GPU hits "No more than 80 °C during Spider-Man on ultra graphics settings without frame generation. Maximum load—up to 99% on GPU and CPU. And temperatures—no more than 80 °C on GPU and 75 °C on CPU."

Those aren't exactly low figures, but the Redditor claims they were going above 100 °C during stress and 80 °C+ without stress prior to the swap. It seems like the paste is the real winner here. But the important thing is that the GPU works now.

And, I personally like the DIY angle of jamming in your own capacitor, even if it makes the card look less clean. There are likely very few people in the world who can claim the GPU running Spider-Man has been operated on by their dad.

Still, External_Length_8877 claims it's only a "temporary solution" while they look for a capacitor with the same size and dimensions as the original they lost.

Though at-home repairs can also be a bit risky, the one silver lining of the memory crisis is that more people are learning to fix their own gear and caring more about repairability. If taking apart a radio and learning about GPUs will save you up to hundreds of dollars, it's a great skill to hone. And there's absolutely charm in your GPU looking just a little DIY.

Update July 9, 2026: The RTX 50-series Super variant listings have been removed from the Seasonic PSU wattage calculator tool, as noted by @unikoshardware. And not just the latest card that was added yesterday, either; the RTX 5080 Super, but also the RTX 5070 Super and RTX 5070 Ti Super that were added further back have also gone.

Now, that could mean different things. Either it was completely erroneous guesswork on the part of Seasonic, and after the publicity it's got from noting the GPU wattage in its calculator it's decided to stick to actually released cards, or it had the right information and was asked to remove it.

One means we're no closer to knowing when the Super series is coming, while the other suggests everything's finalised and ready to roll. Though, given that these cards were expected earlier this year, I would expect everything would already have been finalised even if the actual release has been pushed back to post-CES next year.

But it's not necessarily a case of no news is good news, it just means more questions.

Original story July 8, 2026: If you thought Nvidia's RTX 50-series Super cards were completely MIA at this point, think again. Seasonic's online PSU calculator tool has listed the RTX 5080 Super, RTX 5070 Ti Super, and RTX 5070 Super among its entries, with increased wattages ranging from an extra 10 to 17% depending on the card.

Granted, it's not exactly much to go on. But the individual listings for the various cards adds more credence to the idea we may eventually see Nvidia's fabled Super variants at some point in the future (via Videocardz).

In terms of individual wattages, the RTX 5070 Super is listed with a 275 W TGP, 25 W more than the non-Super card's 250 W spec. The RTX 5070 Ti Super has a listed TGP of 350 W, a 50 W increase, while the RTX 5080 Super is given a 415 W figure, 55 W more than the standard RTX 5080.

Which all seems fairly reasonable. The long-mooted RTX 50-series Super range is expected to be made up of several of the existing RTX 50-series GPUs with increased clock speeds and VRAM loadouts, which would explain the higher power allocations.

That being said, I would imagine the specifics of the extra wattage bumps are likely to be guesses, as Nvidia has been tight-lipped regarding the RTX 50-series Super refresh to date—although they do align with some of Kopite7kimi's earlier predictions. There's a good chance that all of the specifications for these RTX Blackwell updates have been known inside Nvidia for a good long while now, and it's not unreasonable to expect those details to have leaked out.

Ever since the memory crisis began to bite (and GPUs continued to increase in price beyond their MSRPs), rumours and speculation around the RTX 50-series Super cards has gradually slowed to a drip, although that seems to be on the turn.

Prominent tech leaker @Zed__Wang suggested last month that the RTX 50-series Super cards were "back on track," alongside a rumour that a 12 GB RTX 5060 was also now on the menu, perhaps under the name RTX 5060 Super.

Given the cadence of the tech launch calendar, I suspect we'd be looking at a potential CES 2027 launch for Nvidia's long-lost 50-series Super models, as the green team has likely been sitting on them for quite some time. And with the RTX 60-series on the way at some point, it'll want the cards on the market for a decent amount of time before they're superseded by the next generation.

The question is, with what are likely to be fairly marginal performance increases, will gamers want them? Especially as they're probably going to cost a decent chunk more than the regular RTX 50-series GPUs proper, which aren't exactly cheap at this point.

It's all still up in the air, but signs are starting to suggest that we'll eventually find out.

As a manufacturing hub, China sees plenty of unique hardware projects—like this gaming Megazord. But there's plenty of innovation to be found beyond one-and-done projects like this.

For instance, back when the US Department of Commerce restricted the export of Nvidia's RTX 4090 cards, Chinese manufacturers got creative. The so-called RTX 4080M card was one result of that, featuring laptop GPU silicon on top of a custom desktop PCIe board (via Videocardz). To be clear, this is not an unofficial Nvidia product and therefore doesn't enjoy official driver support or warranties.

In fact, Nvidia addressed the gap in the China market the 4080M attempted to fill with the export-only RTX 4090 D model back in 2023. However, testing by Bilibili user 杰某 (Jie Mou) suggests this curio is at least worth a closer look.

The Bilibili user carried out testing on a machine with an Intel Core Ultra 270K Plus CPU mounted on a Maxsun Z890-A motherboard, plus 32 GB of DDR5 RAM. The 4080M achieved a graphics score of 18,614 in 3DMark Time Spy. Though that's not unimpressive in itself, what's perhaps more interesting is that it did this by pulling a fraction of the power required by a traditional RTX 4080.

An official Nvidia RTX 4080 mobile can draw a maximum of 175 W TGP, though the unofficial RTX 4080M used only 100 W.

So yes, that would all be very impressive, were it not for the fact that the RTX 4080M is only available in China and currently costs between 2,700 and 2,800 RMB due to various component shortages. Very roughly equivalent to $400 or £300, this price tag makes it comparable to the going rate for both Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti and AMD's RX 9070 GRE in China.

The unofficial 4080M did hold its own in gaming tests pitted against the similarly priced RX 9070 GRE (Both cards also enjoy 12GB of VRAM). Though the RX 9070 GRE had the edge in most games, the 4080M enjoyed about 10 more fps in Delta Force (4K, Ultra settings). PUBG proved another interesting outlier, with the 4080M achieving 100 more frames than the AMD card (2K, Ultra).

All of that said, the 4080M arguably isn't the card to go for if you're based in China—unless you're building an ITX system where limited thermal headroom is a concern. Otherwise, the Bilibili tester says that PC builders are generally better off going with a newer, more performant card that's similarly priced (though personally I'm still compelled to give the 4080M points for its small form factor cuteness).

As for PC gamers based in the US, you can keep track of the GPU market's ups and downs with our graphics card price watch.

AMD's latest line of GPUs barely followed MSRP at launch, and yet they may be set to get even pricier in the future.

As reported by Sweclockers, a poster took to Board Channels, a forum for communicating between manufacturers and partners, to share news of an AMD price increase. Effectively, it claims that Sapphire, Asus, and XFX have all been told that the supply price of GPU and video memory bundles from AMD will be bumped up by around 10% in July.

The post in question has been machine translated by Sweclockers, as the board primarily operates in Chinese, and it's otherwise difficult to get access to. It tends to be well vetted, so claims made on the forum tend to have some validity, though AMD haven't confirmed anything as of yet.

Historically AMD and Nvidia have provided graphics card manufacturers with the video memory in a bundle with the GPU. That made sense for the GPU manufacturer as it could take advantage of the economies of scale to buy that VRAM in bulk. However, the memory crisis has proven to be a thorn in the side of consumer PC hardware, and for every manufacturer, so those bundles are going up and it seems likely the end user will be the one paying at least some of the extra.

Though it's not absolutely guaranteed the reported 10% price increase will be passed on to the consumer, partners buying GPU bundles for manufacture won't want to take the price hit on their own, so they will likely adjust their own pricing to make up the difference.

As the price increase is expected to come into effect in July, partners should honour supply deals made prior to the change. So, any cards already in retailers, and those already in the manufacturing pipeline theoretically shouldn't be affected. That 10% increase won't be immediately visible, though it will likely hit us all eventually.

Late last year, it was rumoured Nvidia would stop bundling VRAM into its GPUs, leaving it up to partners to buy the GPU die alone and purchase the rest of the supporting cast themselves. It was theorised that would allow larger manufacturers, with wider relations to GDDR6/7 suppliers, to pick and choose where to buy their VRAM from, but the flip side is that smaller GPU vendors without those connections might struggle to compete.

So, while the price increase is a bummer, at least AMD is in some way helping support its smaller partners. Small crumbs, I know.

Unfortunately, with the memory crisis likely to go on for some time still, AMD probably isn't going to be bringing those prices back down any time soon. That means things are likely to get worse for hardware manufacturers and enthusiasts before they get any better.

Rumours of its resurrection rumbled away for months, but Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB graphics card has indeed been churned out from fresh runs of GPU production lines, with models hitting retailers' shelves in Germany. However, if you were hoping to pick up a cheap, older-generation card with lots of VRAM, then you're going to be disappointed when you see the price tag.

Computerbase reported the news of the fresh production runs, and a quick check of Mindfactory confirms the re-release of the GeForce RTX 3060. However, the German retailer is currently only offering a single Asus model. With an asking price of €338.99 (£291.86, $386.27), though, sales are unlikely to be especially healthy.

You only need to briefly glance through the latest GPU deals to see that this amount of money will get you a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB in the US and an RTX 5060 8 GB in the UK, both of which will easily surpass the RTX 3060 in games. Both Blackwell GPUs have more shader units, more cache, and more memory bandwidth than the six-year-old Ampere chip, plus they support the full DLSS 4.5 tech suite.

While the RTX 3060 really only lacks DLSS Frame Generation, it also has weaker Tensor and RT cores than those in the RTX 50-series GPUs, so any game that utilises them just isn't going to be as performant. What the last-last-gen graphics card does offer more of is VRAM, of course, specifically 50% more and in some gaming scenarios, the extra memory will certainly help.

Is that enough to justify the price tag? The short answer is no; the long answer is noooooooo.

When we reviewed the GeForce RTX 4060 back in June 2023, we recorded an average frame rate of 72 fps, with a 1% low rate of 46 fps, in Metro Exodus Enhanced (1080p Ultra). The RTX 3060 produced figures of 58 and 35 fps, respectively. Fast forward to May of last year, and the RTX 5060 pulled 87 and 47 fps, even with its shoddy launch drivers.

That's by no means indicative of how every game will run on an RTX 3060, compared to the latest GPUs, but a 50% higher average frame rate is not to be sniffed at. Swap the 5060 for an 8 GB RTX 5060 Ti, and you'll be looking at a 74% uplift on the average frame rate. Even an RTX 5050 is faster in that game, though not by very much.

The point is that the resurrection of the RTX 3060 is helping any PC gamer in these wallet-punishing times, and no amount of yelling about 8 GB of VRAM not being enough is going to offset the fact that the price is just far too high. If you really must have more graphics memory than this, then you'll be better off with an Arc B570 graphics card. While its performance is a bit wonky, it at least has 10 GB of VRAM, and you can pick one up for $250.

After accidentally dropping its source code on GitHub last year and kicking the door wide open for modders, AMD has done something exactly what it promised to: It's added support for FSR 4.1 to Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards in its latest Adrenalin drivers.

The 26.2.2 driver set doesn't come with many other goodies (game support for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced and Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations), but I don't think many Team Red fans will care all that much, because FSR 4.1 is considerably more noteworthy. Compared to FSR 3, the quality of the AI-powered upscaling and frame generation is clearly superior and almost on par with Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 suite.

Back in May, AMD promised it would bring its best FSR algorithms to RDNA 3 cards in June, and true to its word, that's exactly what it has done. Unless a game has native support for FSR 4.1, you'll need to enable it via an override in Adrenalin (which does require the game to have a native FSR 3.1 implementation).

Something else worth noting is that RDNA 3-based FSR 4.1 is likely to be less performant than the RDNA 4-based one. I say 'likely' as I've not had the chance to test it yet, but simply going on the fact that the matrix operations ability of RX 7000 cards is far lower than that of RX 9000 ones, something has to give.

That means you're either going to get the same kind of performance uplift but not quite the same visual fidelity, or vice versa, when comparing FSR 4.1 on a Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 7800 XT, for example. Don't misunderstand me: Switching on FSR 4.1 with an RDNA 3 card will still give a performance boost, but the end result won't be quite as impressive as it is on an RDNA 4 one.

Still, it'll be nicer on the eyes than FSR 3.1, no matter how different it all is. And if you have an RX 6000-series graphics card, then it's worth noting that AMD said that it'll bring FSR 4.1 to that platform next year. Yes, that's a long ol' wait, but given how yucky prices for PC parts are right now, I should imagine a good number of RDNA 2 users will be clinging on to those cards for a good while longer anyway.

You might wonder what was so specific about the June date for RDNA 3 FSR 4.1, and now that the Steam Machine has been released, we know exactly why: Valve is working with AMD to add the fancy algorithms to its little box of underwhelm, although "coming soon" is the only commitment we've got for a release date.

Valve's Steam Hardware survey is no stranger to data anomalies. And yet it remains an undeniable source of interest and intrigue if you're into PC hardware. So, here's the latest twist. AMD's Radeon 9070 XT is subject to an implausibly big upgrade in terms of its user numbers in the latest survey for May, suggesting that there's been a change in the way the 9070 XT's data is collected or tagged.

In previous Steam Hardware Surveys, the 9070 XT has essentially been Sir Not Appearing in This Data. It simply didn't figure. But suddenly, here it is in the latest survey with 1.33% of Steam users, placing it 23rd among discrete GPUs.

Valve lists the top 100 entries, which currently reaches down to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT on 0.17%. The point here is that it's highly implausible that the 9700 XT has gone from zero in previous months to suddenly representing 1.33% of Steam gamers. It's not like it's just gone on sale.

Now, you could write this off as another Steam data anomaly that's likely to vanish in future surveys, like the fairly frequent anomalies in the survey caused by Chinese Lunar New Year. However, there's another data point in the new survey that likely reveals what's actually going on.

The listing in the survey for generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics" GPUs has dropped from 2.37% share in April to 0.90% in the new May data. That's a drop of around 1.47% and suspiciously close to the 1.33% the 9070 XT picked up over the same period.

Odds are, then, that either Valve has made changes to the way it collects data to better identify AMD GPUs. Or AMD has tweaked its driver software to the same ultimate effect. In other words, 9070 XTs that were being lumped into that generic Radeon category are now being counted properly.

The slight remaining gap between the loss of share of the generic Radeon class and the 9070 XT's gains can be easily accounted for by several factors. There may be other GPUs that have also benefited from the data collection changes (though not the vanilla RX 9070, which was in the previous few surveys and has not leapt up the ranks this month).

At the same time, presumably not everyone with and AMD GPU has updated to the latest drivers. So, that could play a part. Whatever, this new survey data seems much more likely to be accurate.

For some time now, AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs including the RX 9070 XT have ranked highly in various sales charts, most obviously on Amazon where a Gigabyte 9070 XT currently ranks as the most popular, which is about as mainstream as it gets. So, the idea that RDNA 4 and the 9070 XT in particular had gained so little traction with Steam gamers was hard to understand.

That's true even if you operate under the assumption that most graphics cards are sold as part of pre-built rigs. Anyway, suffice to say that the 9070 XT has now been installed in something more closely resembling its rightful place in the Steam Hardware Survey and we can all relax. Until the next anomaly gets our data antennae twitching.

Intel and Nvidia are on the record regarding plans to combine graphics chiplets from the latter with CPUs from the former. When this is going to happen, however, now that's a question.

And the answer, according to a new leak, is early 2028 and maybe just in time for a launch at the CES show that year. Even more exciting, the new chip is set to have stiff competition from both Nvidia itself and AMD, perhaps heralding a new era of high-performance handheld PC gaming.

Tech journalist Erdi Özüağ claims that, "according to Intel's current roadmap, the targeted date for next-generation processors featuring Nvidia graphics units is the first quarter of 2028, and if plans do not change, the CES 2028 show could serve as the launch event."

That's not all that far away and, at the rate things are going in the stand-alone graphics card market, could align with new desktop GPU generations. Indeed, an early 2028 launch would make it very likely that Intel processors with Nvidia chiplets would get the upcoming Rubin graphics architecture.

Nvidia recently revealed that a Rubin-based version of its own new RTX Spark CPU-GPU superchip will be launched in 2028. It's not known when RTX Rubin desktop graphics cards, perhaps to be branded the RTX 60 Series, will arrive. But the latest rumours point to late 2027 or early 2028, which does indeed line up with this new "leak."

If this information is accurate, 2028 could be the year that APUs or chips combining CPU and GPU in a single package make a really big impact on PC gaming. These APUs are the class of chip used in handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, of course. Along with these new Intel-Nvidia chips, we'll have Nvidia's own second-gen RTX Spark offering in 2028.

It's possible AMD could also launch new APUs in 2028, codenamed Grimlock Point and Grimlock Halo. Those APUs are not actually next-generation, which are the Medusa Point and Medusa Halo chips due later this year or in 2027, but the generation after that.

There are various rumours around what silicon production nodes all these chips will be using. By 2028, TSMC's upcoming N2 node will be quite mature and its A14 silicon could even be an option. Meanwhile, Intel's 14A node will supposedly be in full production by 2028.

Whatever, it seems safe to say that all of these new APUs will at least benefit from significantly more advanced silicon than anything available today. And that should allow both a high transistor budget for more performance and better efficiency.

So, it's pretty exciting to think about the levels of performance and battery life that might be possible in a handheld PC when all these new APUs come online in 2028. Indeed, 2028 is also a plausible launch date for the second coming of Valve's super-popular Steam Deck handheld.

Just like the OG Deck, Steam Deck 2 is likely to get custom silicon. Valve has spoken repeatedly about wanting, essentially, to wait for a really major advance in both performance and efficiency before releasing a follow up to the Steam Deck. And it very much looks like 2028 could be the year that such technology finally becomes available.

Watch this space, but 2028 could well be the year that handheld gaming makes a big leap forward. Let's just pray that the memory crisis is more or less over by then, otherwise these fab new devices might be too expensive to really matter.

Two months ago, Asus announced the ROG Equalizer, a power cable for certain Nvidia RTX graphics cards designed to banish the fear of melting connectors once and for all. Well, perhaps not completely so, because it seems we now have the first case of a melted ROG Equalizer cable.

As posted on ChipHell and reported by Uniko's Hardware on X (via Videocardz), there's admittedly very little information to go on, other than a crystal-clear picture of a seriously fried connector at the end of an Asus ROG Equalizer cable. Three of the six power pins look properly scorched, with one showing a considerable degree of melting in the plastic housing.

However, there's no indication as to what PSU and graphics card this cable was plugged into, nor the circumstances as to how the melty-melty all came about, so the one thing we can't do right now is point our fingers at Asus and go 'Ha! Your cable is rubbish!' Well, we can, but we just can't use this solitary picture as evidence for such a judgment.

If you're unaware of what all the hoohar is about Nvidia's 12VHPWR (and the subsequent 12V-2x6 design update) connector, let me give you a quick explainer. In order to have its graphics card use gopping great globs of power but also not require lots of big connectors on the card's PCB, Nvidia designed a compact system to be used instead of the traditional 8-pin PCIe system.

A precursor to 12VHPWR first appeared on certain RTX 30-series cards, such as the RTX 3090 Ti and 3060 Ti Founders Editions. This design just comprised twelve power pins (six +12V, six ground), but the iteration of the design that was approved by PCI-SIG and adopted into the PCIe specifications also housed four more pins for sensing.

That format first showed up on Nvidia's RTX 40-series, and almost immediately, reports of melting connectors appeared from owners of GeForce RTX 4090 cards. So much so that it resulted in a class action lawsuit against Nvidia being filed in 2022.

The problem is quite simple. A full load, an RTX 4090 can use up to 450 W of power, but distributed across six pins, each one only has to deal with 6.25 A of current. However, should one pin fail in some way, or the graphics card draw more current in one or two pins than the others, the resulting load imbalance can push the current over the 12VHPWR's design rating of 8.33 A per pin.

Fast forward to today, and we now have a power supply market replete with all kinds of 'solutions' to the connector melting problem. Even the minor redesign, called 12V-2x6, did little to prevent the problem from occurring. Der8auer's detailed analysis of the Asus ROG Equalizer cable shows that while it's a decent enough product, it doesn't really offer much in the way of protection against the problem.

With RTX 5090 graphics cards now costing more than $4,000 in the US, you'd think there would be a far more concerted effort to banish meltygate once and for all. Part of the reason as to why we haven't seen a permanent solution yet is that the fact not every 4090 or 5090 owner has suffered from a melting connector.

The exact number of casualties is probably impossible to determine, but since graphics card vendors, as well as Nvidia, put money aside each year to cover warranty claims, the only way that they would really sit up and pay attention is if the total cost of all the replacements for damaged cards consistently exceeded the pot of money for claims.

We probably can't rely on hardware vendors coming up with a permanent solution, either. It's unlikely that Nvidia will abandon 12V-2x6 in favour of a completely new design, and having active load balancing on graphics cards will eat into a vendor's profit margins (though they're hardly small sums of money when it comes to the RTX 5090).

This particular instance of a melted ROG Equalizer cable could be entirely user error or even a clickbait thing, just to get a bit of attention, but since Asus' design has no means to actively prevent one pin from supplying too much current, this will almost certainly not be the only case we'll see, genuine or otherwise.

If you do have a very high-power RTX card with a 12VHPWR/12V-2x6 connector, here's my advice for keeping it as melt-free as possible:

1. Try to use a PSU that has a native 12VHPWR socket and cable: this won't guarantee perfect safety, but it removes the multiple points of failure you can get with adapter cables.
2. Don't keep removing the cable to check that it's okay: Power cables aren't designed to be repeatedly unplugged and jammed back in, and doing so can weaken the connections, leading to smaller contact patches and thus higher temperatures.
3. Explore undervolting your graphics card: You can just drop the maximum power limit for your RTX GPU in the Nvidia app, but you're better off following a detailed guide on how to lower your GPU's voltage across its range of clock speeds. If it all works as intended, you should get a graphics card that not only uses less power but is also cooler and, in some cases, able to clock higher.

Until we have graphics cards and/or power supply units that actively monitor the current draw on each pin, and dynamically prevent it from exceeding a set limit as standard, the melting connectors are still going to be a thing that will hit the headlines from time to time. Just like this one.

The latest market data from research outfit Jon Peddie shows that the volume of PC graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of this year actually held up pretty well, despite the broader chip crisis. But AMD is basically flat lining, stuck at well under 10% of the market, albeit with caveats attached to the quality of JPR's data.

According to JPR, 11.82 million PC graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of 2026. Note, that's shipped, not sold, there's an important difference which we'll come to in a moment. But that's only very slightly down on the 11.9 million units JPR estimates for the last quarter of 2025.

However, it's well up on the 9.2 million units the research outfit has inked in for Q1 2025. Year-on-year, then, things are looking pretty healthy for PC graphics. Or are they?

As 3D Center points out, "it's important to note that these figures represent shipments to graphics card manufacturers, not shipments to retailers or their sales figures. Therefore, this result could be partly due to graphics card manufacturers stockpiling in anticipation of the memory shortage (they wanted to quickly buy up supplies at a lower price)."

In other words, we'll have to see what the data looks like over the next few quarters to be sure. Meanwhile, what of AMD's ongoing struggle to make a dent in Nvidia's market domination?

Here, the news isn't great, though there's a pretty major caveat. JPR puts AMD at a mere 8% market share in these latest figures, or exactly the same as the previous quarter.

However, when JPR originally released its Q4 2025 figures, it had AMD down for just 5% of the market. For this latest release, AMD's Q4 numbers were revised, adding an extra 400,000 GPU shipments to its tally for the quarter and thus taking AMD to 8% and a total of one million units in the updated figures.

That's a pretty huge revision for AMD's numbers and does somewhat undermine the overall credibility of JPR's data. The company has form when it comes to data errors. Like the time when it wrongly included a load of Intel data centre chips as gaming GPUs and thus implausibly decided that Intel was matching AMD for GPU market share.

When JPR originally released its Q4 2025 data, there was some scepticism. Some observers pointed out that AMD earned $843 million in gaming revenue or 22% of Nvidia's reported $3.7 billion in gaming revenue in that quarter. Moreover, AMD graphics card don't extend across the whole market and it's extremely likely that the average selling price of an AMD GPU is much lower than that of an Nvidia GPU.

With all that in mind, the conclusion is that it is very hard to imagine AMD achieving 22% revenue share with just 5% unit sales of the PC graphics market. The confusing factor here is that AMD and Nvidia's "gaming" revenues also including console chip sales. And there, AMD has both Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, while Nvidia is essentially limited to Nintendo Switch sales.

Anywho, make of it all what you will. As it stands, it looks like the PC graphics card market is probably doing OK despite RAM and SSD prices getting silly. But we'll have to wait and see how things pan out later in the year before we can assume everything is going to keep on being dandy.

In the midst of the RAMpocalypse and the billions of dollars being thrown at AI, it's easy to become blind to the fact that the use of machine learning can be highly beneficial in lots of different scenarios. Case in point: an update to an old AMD GPU Linux driver was created with the help of Microsoft's Copilot.

As reported by Phoronix, the driver is R600 Gallium3D, an open-source package for Mesa, that's exclusively for AMD's Terascale architecture GPUs. These first appeared in 2007, with the Radeon HD 2000-series, before bowing out with the HD 6000-series three years later (though a variety of rebadged chips continued to appear in later Radeon models).

Since AMD no longer offers any kind of official support or updates for this driver set, it's down to the coding community to keep these alive, and Gert Wolny seems to be one of the very few coders working on the R600 drivers these days. Since it's obviously not a full-time, paid job, you'd naturally expect anyone in this situation to be getting help from any source available.

That's precisely what's happened in this instance, where Wolny has leaned on GitHub Copilot to help out with tidying up the shader compiler code. This process is called refactoring, and it essentially irons out hiccups, bloated code, duplication, and so on without changing what it all fundamentally does.

This is something that AI is quite good at, as it can quickly spot things among the vast sea of code lines that the human brain could potentially miss. Microsoft has a short tutorial on Copilot refactoring if you're interested in learning more about what it can do.

Admittedly, none of this is likely to be noteworthy to most PC gamers, because it's only for old hardware that can't be used to run any of the latest games. But if you do have a penchant for vintage hardware, running on Linux to avoid having to deal with Windows spitting the dummy out over drivers, then it's surely good news for you.

One question worth considering is how long it will be before AI is used to handle the whole process of keeping older hardware alive and kicking, rather than just doing a spot of code spring cleaning. Given how rapidly we've gone from AI simply being a topic of academic interest to now defining today's world of computing, the answer is likely to be 'not very long at all.'

Safe to say, as we approach the midpoint of 2026, it hasn't exactly been a vintage year for GPU launches. We'll come to the details, but so far you're looking at a couple of very minor revisions of existing GPUs. And now comes a rumour that our only real hope for something slightly exciting this year has been punted out to 2027.

Yup, the latest word on Nvidia's on-again-off-again RTX 50 Super Series GPUs is that they won't appear until early 2027. As spotted by Videocardz, the usually well-informed Taiwanese website Benchlife says that although there were some previous indications of a late 2026 launch, their understanding is that the RTX 50 Super GPUs won't be seen until CES 2027 in January at the earliest.

So far in 2026, we've had the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE and the Nvidia RTX 5070 12 GB for laptops. The first is a revision of an existing GPU with slightly knocked-down specs, and the second merely an existing GPU with some more video memory—a chipset so momentous, Nvidia "launched" it by mentioning it as an aside in the release notes for a driver update.

One might point to the Intel Arc Pro B70. But that's a $1,000 AI GPU with the gaming performance of a $400 desktop graphics card. So, it's hard to see how it's relevant. And Nvidia's new RTX Spark is an APU with CPU cores, not a pure GPU. And, anyway, it's just a rebadge of the DGX Spark chip announced over a year ago and finally released in October.

As for the rest of the year, well, the AMD Radeon RX 9050 budget GPU is expected, but that's supposedly based on the same Navi 44 chip as the RX 9060 and RX 9060 XT. Beyond that, there's a purported Nvidia RTX 5050 9 GB, which again is a tweaked version of an existing GPU.

As we reported earlier today, AMD is now not expected to launch its next-gen RDNA 5 graphics chips until late 2027 or even 2028. And if Nvidia's revised RTX 50 Supers really do arrive early next year, it's hard to see how Nvidia's actual next-gen graphics architecture, Rubin, arrives any earlier than RDNA 5.

In other words, if the RTX 50 Supers come in early 2027, Nvidia is hardly going to replace them with brand-new Rubin just a couple of months later. All of which means that 2026 is almost certainly going to be incredibly slim pickings for new GPUs, and there's a chance 2027 mightn't be all that much better.

If AMD RDNA 4 and Nvidia Rubin do slip to 2028, then the best we can hope for is tweaks of existing GPUs, including the RTX 50 Super Series, in 2027.

All I can say is, props to you if you managed to bag an RTX 4090 at something close to its MSRP back when it launched in October 2022. Putting multi-frame gen to one side, it's otherwise still the second fastest GPU today. And it now looks likely that by the time something faster comes out, it will have been either the fastest or second fastest graphics card you can buy for six years or more. That's an incredible run.

Back in November of last year, rumours were abounding that Nvidia had cancelled the expected Super refresh of its RTX 50-series of graphics cards, though at the time, I thought the whole thing was nonsense. However, six months on, and there's still no sign of them thanks to the RAMpocalypse, but it might not be totally game over, if one person is to be believed.

This is all according to MEGAsizeGPU on X, who has a pretty decent track record of dropping hints and tidbits that eventually come true. "RTX 50 Super is back on track," they write, before adding something extra. "This time includes 5060 12G (or maybe it will have a new name as 5060 super)."

Nvidia has done two lots of RTX Super refresh in the past, starting with the RTX 20-series (2080, 2070, 2060 Supers) and then again with the RTX 40-series (4080, 4070 Ti, 4070 Supers). In all cases, the Super variant of a given RTX graphics card sported a GPU that had more shader units than the original model, either by using a complete version of the same processor die or a more heavily cut-down chip from the next tier up.

For example, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti uses a full AD104 die with 7680, whereas the RTX 4070 Ti Super sports an AD103 chip with 8448 shaders. The full version of that GPU, with 10240 shaders, is used in the RTX 4080 Super.

Nvidia will have lots of Blackwell dies sitting in its inventory that just can't be used in any current product, because they just don't have sufficient functional parts and/or operating clock speeds to meet an SKU's requirements. Hence, the need for a Super refresh, in which they can be used.

The exception to this is the GB203 in the RTX 5080, which is already a full die, but the main point of interest for the RTX 50 Supers isn't so much the shader count as how much VRAM will be on the graphics cards. Current Blackwell gaming cards use 2 GB GDDR7 modules, but it's generally expected that the Supers will use 3 GB ones. So instead of having 16 GB, the RTX 5080 Super would have 24 GB.

This is where MEGAsizeGPU's RTX 5060 claim comes in. At the moment, this is an 8 GB graphics card, using four 2 GB modules. However, with 3 GB chips, the total amount of VRAM would increase to 12 GB, putting it on par with the much-loved RTX 3060 (and the RTX 4070 and 5070).

I still believe that Nvidia will release an RTX 50 Super refresh at some point in the near future, pushing the RTX 60-series further down the road until the gaming PC market is in a better position to switch to a newer GPU. As to exactly what those Supers will be like, here's my current thinking:

• RTX 5080 Super - 10240 shaders, 2.7 GHz boost clock, 24 GB VRAM
• RTX 5070 Ti Super - 9718 shaders, 2.6 GHz boost clock, 16 GB VRAM
• RTX 5070 Super - 6272 shaders, 2.5 GHz boost clock, 16 GB VRAM
• RTX 5060 Super - 3840 shaders, 2.5 GHz boost clock, 12 GB VRAM

Why do I think the 5070 and 5070 Ti Supers won't have more VRAM than this? The answer is the RAMpocalypse and the limited supply of GDDR7. No company other than Nvidia is using it, but DRAM manufacturers are favouring memory production for the AI market, not gaming, so rather than using six modules on the 5070 Super's 192-bit memory bus, it'll be reduced to 128-bits in size so that four 3 GB modules can be used.

In the case of the RTX 5070 Ti, I reckon that Nvidia won't change the VRAM count at all, again for supply reasons.

Of course, one person saying the Super series is back on and me slapping down a handful of considered GPU specs means very little in the grand scheme of things, so we'll just have to wait and see if the refresh actually appears. And even if it does, will it be this year or early 2027? Assuming PC gaming hasn't been DRAM-priced out of existence by then.

A new report citing graphics card makers at the Computex show claims AMD's next-gen RDNA 5 GPUs won't appear until at least late next year and perhaps not until early 2028. AMD's current RDNA 4 graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 9070 XT, were released in March 2025.

Dutch website Tweakers says it spoke with several graphics card manufacturers at Computex. One reportedly said that the expectation was that RDNA 5 would arrive in the second half of 2027. But another thought that too optimistic, predicting a late 2027 or early 2028 launch window.

Historically, both AMD and its main rival in the PC graphics market, Nvidia, have released new GPU families on a two-year cadence. But that has been slipping slightly of late.

AMD's first RDNA 3 GPUs, topped by the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, were released in December 2022. RDNA 4 didn't follow until March 2025. If RDNA 5 doesn't land until late 2027, that'll mean a full year has been added to the launch cycles since RDNA 3 in 2022.

For what it's worth, we're not necessarily expecting Nvidia to stick to the traditional two-year cadence with its next-gen Rubin graphics cards, either. Nvidia also slightly slipped with the RTX 5090, which arrived in January 2025, following the RTX 4090's release in October 2022.

For what it's worth, at Computex Nvidia said it planned to release the Vera Rubin iteration of its RTX Spark chip in 2028. That's an APU with a CPU and graphics, not a pure GPU. But it's the closest we currently have to an indication regarding Nvidia's plans for next-gen PC gaming graphics.

Of course, you could actually argue that the later AMD's RDNA 5 and indeed Nvidia's Rubin arrives, in some ways the better. The PC hardware industry is currently being suffocated by elevated chip prices driven by the AI boom. If pushing RDNA 5 out makes it more affordable, that could be preferable to an earlier release at sky-high prices.

All that said, if the AI boom keeps booming, we could end up with RDNA 5 being both late and very expensive. PC gamers haven't had much luck recently, what with the prices of so much hardware spiralling out of reach. So, here's hoping that by the the RDNA 5 finally surfaces, we're back to something resembling a normal and functional hardware market.

Like all the major players in the PC industry, AMD had a big presence at Computex 2026, and all its top staff were busy conducting interviews with the press and media. In one such case, the senior confirmed that there are no current plans to bring AI-powered FSR 4.1 upscaling and frame generation to RDNA 3.5 GPUs. However, this prompted another figure to step in and declare that no such decision had actually been made.

Let's start at the beginning. Yesterday, HardwareLuxx reported on various discussions it had with David McAfee, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager of its client division, while at Computex. When they got on to the subject of FSR, McAfee reportedly said that the company had no current plans to bring its all-singing, all-dancing FSR 4.1 to GPUs based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture.

You won't find those chips inside graphics cards; these are integrated GPUs housed in certain Ryzen AI 300/400/Max processors and AMD's latest Ryzen Z2 Extreme APUs for handheld gaming PCs. As things currently stand, they have to use FSR 3.1, which is entirely shader-based and doesn't have anything like the quality of FSR 4.

Changing the code so that it could run on such GPUs would mean sacrificing some of the performance gains from using its AI-generated upscaling and frame generation, as the architecture doesn't sport the same level of matrix processing as RDNA 4. But given the capabilities of the smaller RDNA 3.5 chips, it would probably be too much of a performance drop to be worth using.

So when Frank Azor, who handles AMD's client and graphics marketing, stepped in via X to respond to Digital Foundry's report on HardwareLuxx's interview, I expected him to say much the same thing.

Except he didn't: "I wasn't there to hear the exact words said however I will share that no such decision as being reported and implied here has been made. We are not ready to speak to any other potential future product plans at this time. We continue to listen to our customers and we hear you."

Depending on who you want to believe, AMD either does or doesn't have any plans currently in place for giving RDNA 3.5 GPU owners a slice of FSR 4.1 goodness.

AMD has confirmed that it is working on bringing official FSR 4 support to RDNA 3 GPUs sometime in July and RDNA 2-based products in early 2027, so why not RDNA 3.5? Looking at the ISA (instruction set architecture) reference document, there's nothing that immediately stands out as being a barrier when comparing it to the same information for RDNA 3.

However, Jack Hynh, general manager of computing and graphics, specifically mentioned Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards, and that rather confirms my suspicions that FSR 4.1 will not be an option for any iGPU, purely because they don't have enough horsepower to run the AI algorithms at the required speed.

Which is perfectly understandable, because there are relatively few Ryzen AI Max-level iGPUs out in the wild, which probably could cope with FSR 4.1, compared to those in laptops and handheld APUs. Why AMD doesn't just simply come out and say this, instead of mincing its words, and having its staff contradict each other and confuse the picture, really puzzles me.

The thing is, that's exactly what HardwareLuxx says David McAfee told it: "During our conversation, we discussed FSR 4.1 on RDNA 3, and it was mentioned that there are currently no plans to implement it on RDNA 3.5. This surprised us as well, so I inquired further, since many PC handhelds would particularly benefit from it. Technical aspects were then explained, such as the lower processing power of the integrated solutions and the memory bandwidth, which have implications for FSR 4.1."

So who to believe? I think there's only one viable solution: Put McAfee and Azor in a ring and have them battle for tech glory. Whoever's left standing is the one we put all our upscaling and frame generation hopes and dreams on. I've got a fiver on McAfee.

Computex is, to a degree, always about excess. It's a tech show, after all. All the big names are fighting for coverage of their latest products, and as a result, we always see outrageous graphics cards covered in exotic materials, some eye-wateringly expensive gaming rigs, and enough RGB lighting to sink a battleship. I know that doesn't quite work as a metaphor, but you know what I mean.

This year has been no exception. But as I've sat here updating our Computex 2026 liveblog with all the latest goodies, it's been difficult to square all the uber-shiny new releases with the state of the tech industry right now. Price rises are wracking the gaming hardware market as we speak, and revelling in ultra-exotic materials and sheer excess feels… slightly wrong? Tone deaf? A little out of touch with the gamer on the street?

That's not to say we shouldn't be interested, of course. We all like a slice of excess in theory, and there's an argument to be made that PC gaming, for many years now, has been something of a luxury pursuit. But 24K gold-plated gaming mice? Crystals on GPU coolers? $3,000+ motherboards with "rocket thruster-grade thermal materials"?

Somehow, this year, it all feels a little… gauche?

Now, I don't want to be a party pooper. Many of the exotic products we've covered have been part of various anniversary celebrations, like this undeniably impressive Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20. And I'm not gonna lie, I've been drooling over it.

I love an overbuilt GPU, and I can even get on board with the fact it's got a curved AMOLED screen for seemingly very little reason. Staring through the shop window at the sweeties I can't afford has been a lifelong habit of mine, and I'm sure I'm far from alone. This is a hell of a display piece—and I'm breathing so heavily, I've fogged up the glass.

But it all comes crashing back down to earth when I see what a regular RTX 5090 costs at this point. My colleague Nick Evanson updates our GPU price guide every week, and he's just finished searching. The cheapest RTX 5090 we can find right now from a retailer we trust is… $4,300. As for the special edition Astral? I genuinely dread to think.

And of course, we've written many, many times about the reasons behind the current prices. The RAMpocalypse being the biggest, but we've also covered the supply chain problems, the war in Iran, and the gradual frog-in-boiling-water effect that has all contributed to making our hobby more expensive than it used to be. Along with many other reasons, naturally.

As a result, it feels a bit bleak out here in the world of PC gaming hardware right now. I hate to be a downer, but when you search for good prices every week like we do, and spot that decent deals are becoming much harder to find, it's difficult not to feel a touch bitter looking at all the shiny stuff I'm never, ever going to be able to reasonably afford.

Still, that's not to say there've been no well-priced products on display. In our quest to show you the most interesting releases from this year's event, we've been sprinkling in some of the less flashy, yet much more obtainable products that most PC gamers might be able to buy without taking out a loan.

Like this Arctic air cooler, for example. It starts at $50, it's got a twin fan/tower design, and it's rather handsome in a utilitarian, rugged sort of way. Sure, you probably missed it in among all the exotic gaming hardware, but it's a very reasonably priced thing.

Or this microATX case with a ferrofluid display for $199. Okay, so it's not cheap as far as regular cases go, but it's got a standout feature that looks more visually impressive than a lot of the mega-priced options splashed all over our feeds right now. I was expecting a much higher price tag based on the gimmick value alone, but hey, I'm happy to be surprised.

And then there's Corsair's new "accessibly priced" TC80 gaming chair, which seems to have struck a chord with many of you. We don't have an exact MSRP just yet, but if it's as well-priced as some of Corsair's other budget offerings, it could be your next affordable gaming throne.

And that's just a small selection. So yes, while we're duty-bound to point at a 256 GB RAM kit for $2,500+ and drop our jaws alongside the rest of you, it's perhaps worth remembering that there are still affordable PC gaming products on the market, depending on what you're searching for.

They don't make the headlines quite as easily, but they're there if you look hard enough.

As for the industry as a whole, though? Well, the consumer tech market has been hit pretty hard, there's no denying it. And while I like to ogle at a bit of gold-plating as much as the next pleb, this year it's all felt a bit much. Here's hoping for… well, here's hoping things are a little better by the time Computex 2027 rolls around. I'm an optimist at heart, dont'cha know.

Galax's Hall of Fame (HOF) range has traditionally been loud and pricey, but its prototype next-gen GPU design at this year's Computex might be over the top, even for Galax. That's because its latest design uses Swarovski crystals for a unique look (and presumably a unique look if it ever makes it to market).

As spotted by Smizu_OC on X (via VideoCardz), Galax showed off this card beside two equally eye-grabbing RTX 5080 designs. The potential RTX 6090 in question is simply called a "next generation concept design" at its Computex booth, so one could argue it's an RTX 50-series Super prototype of some kind. But Nvidia would have to actually launch that series for this to happen, which seems pretty unlikely at this point.

It's not clear yet how many Swarovski crystals are being used in the prototype, but there are crystal-like shapes in each corner of the GPU, so one can assume what those are. There are some on the back of the card, too, but without more information on the specific crystals, it's hard to say exactly how much it's worth.

I was sort of hoping it would look a little nicer, to be honest. I like the all-white look, but the crystals more or less feel slapped on. It reminds me of when I used to throw any old sticker onto my electric guitar just to cover up the horrible Fender knock-off I started with.

The concept isn't all about the looks, though. A placard to the left mentions a fully customised PCB with custom components, as well as proprietary fans, a quad fan configuration, and a large vapour chamber. It also mentions new HOF AI software for monitoring GPU temperature and RGB effects.

Speaking of AI, the sheer decadence of this card feels fitting for Computex but also a tad tone deaf, given that many cannot afford an RTX card right now. The explosion of AI into the mainstream has taken much of the memory with it and is threatening the supply of other components, too.

Still, decadence is part of the HOF series' "thing", so it's not too out of character, and Galax is likely looking for a marketing win right now, too. Just last month, it was announced that Galax would be entirely controlled by its parent company, Palit, but not before it was first suggested that the entire company would be closing (this turned out to be a miscommunication, according to Palit).

Still, a prototype is just that: something intended to show off. We have no guarantee we'll actually be able to buy what Galax has been cooking up, even if we could afford it (which, let's face it, we probably can't).

Having only just finished my testing and review of the Radeon RX 9070 GRE before I flew out to Taipei for Computex 2026, I wanted to take the opportunity when I sat down with AMD's David McAfee to talk about one of the most impressive things I've seen in all the Navi 48 GPUs I've played with: the overclocking headroom.

More specifically, the performance headroom you can squeeze out of the GPU when you undervolt it. David McAfee runs AMD's Ryzen and Radeon business, so I was keen to find out how that came about given that for generations of GPU that hasn't been the case.

"It was certainly not accidental," says McAfee. "I think that we understand that, both for CPUs and GPUs, overclockability is a core part of what many of our buyers, our gamers and enthusiasts, are looking for. I think that in years past, you know, the product definition would squeeze every bit of overclocking headroom out of the product and productise it just as a stock SKU, a pre-configured SKU. And that left the community with really no room to have have fun with the product and experiment and see what they could do."

But that is no longer the case and it's incredibly gratifying to note that was on deliberate and is a strategy going forward, too.

"Our strategy with this generation of products and going forward is very different," he says. "I was a part of the Ryzen journey from the very beginning, and stepping into the Radeon space, I think that it is the same sort of story arc that we want to create. Where Ryzen over the years was about giving users more for their money, being very community centric, and delivering the type of experience that they want out of that platform. And I think with Radeon it's the same thing.

"Sure, it's going to take us generations to build the perfect Radeon platform, but I think the core of Radeon has to be all about value to the end user and what they get out of that system.

"It's all about great experiences in a GPU. That ties into things like FSR and game support, and really interesting new technology integrated into high-profile game titles. And I think the last part of it is listening to the community and understanding that you know what users are going to want out of those products and cards is not necessarily something where every bit of performance is delivered out of the box, and it's not always cranked up to 11, there's still a little bit of room to go."

Cooler Master is bringing back the blower-style GPU shroud with its new MasterFlow accessory. It's designed to sit atop of a graphics card and redirect the hot exhaust that is often pewed towards the CPU outside of the case instead.

If you've been building PCs for a little while now, you'll be familiar with the blower-style shroud. It used to be a mainstay of reference cards, such as Nvidia's GTX 10-series, but has been ditched in favour of more effective dual- or triple-fan setups, often with a heatsink exposed on both sides of the card.

Blower-style fans would push hot air outside of the case, via the expansion slots. Whereas modern GPU designs are more effective at cooling the GPU, they often send the hot air upwards towards the CPU, thus increasing temps. So Cooler Master had an idea:

"What we wanted to do is help to eliminate hot air from the GPU going into the CPU area," says Cooler Master representative Brett Buren at Cooler Master HQ in Taiwan.

"Obviously, with a lot of new GPUs, like 5080s and 5090s, they have a passage on the back of the GPU to let hot air escape. But the downside of that is that it interferes with the CPU."

"So with a simple blower fan attachment, we're able to isolate that hot air and get it out of the case before it interacts with anything."

The Master Flow rest atop of a graphics card, in what is often an unused expansion slot, and collects the hot exhaust air. A small radial fan inside blows the air towards the slot, and reportedly this offers a big benefit for CPU temps: around a four to six degree improvement.

I picked it up at the event and it has some adjustment for a range of GPU sizes—sliding back and forth for a range of lengths.

For now, Cooler Master is planning to use the MasterFlow in its own prebuilt systems. I'm hoping to see this one land on the shelves for consumers, however, as it feels like it could come in useful for systems running at the very edge of acceptable thermals.

We live in some odd times when the CEO of a tech company can be seen working crowds, signing autographs, and generally giving off film star vibes, but that seems to be norm when it comes to Nvidia's Jensen Huang whenever he's in Taiwan. But it was during one such moment at Computex that he said something that would resonate with any PC gamer: declaring that the GTX 1080 Ti was a bit special.

The brief interaction was shared by MilGrauNews on X, where somebody (apparently the OP's girlfriend) handed Jensen an original GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for signing. "Oh, one of my favourites," he enthusiastically responded. "Oh, my god. This is one of the best. This changed everything."

For once, Nvidia's CEO has said something that I wholeheartedly agree with, as the GTX 1080 Ti was outstanding for its time—and for many more years to come. To understand why, we need to go back to May 2016, when Nvidia launched its Pascal GPU architecture. The initial line-up of graphics cards sporting these chips topped out with the GeForce GTX 1080, but then three months later, the Titan X Pascal made an appearance.

That graphics card used a slightly cut-down GP102 GPU, with 3,584 shaders and 12 GB of GDDR5X. It was mighty powerful, but also outrageously expensive at $1,199, though certainly not the most costly that Team Green had released at that point (the $2,299 Titan Z from 2014 takes that award).

But in March 2017, Nvidia did something very special; something that it's never done since and will probably never do again. It launched the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, a GP102-powered graphics card that also had 3,584 shaders and just one GB of GDDR5X less than the Titan X Pascal.

What made the launch special was the price, just $699. Since it used faster VRAM chips than those on the Titan card, it actually had more memory bandwidth, so you were effectively getting an equally, or slightly more, capable graphics card for 42% less money.

Nvidia would eventually go on to release the Titan Xp, in April 2017, that used a full-spec GP102 GPU, with 3,840 shaders for the same price as the first Pascal Titan. But, with the 1080 Ti being so good and so much better value, relatively few people were interested in it. I must admit that I was one such person and bought an Xp, but that was the last time I ever forked out for a range-topping Nvidia graphics card.

In many ways, Pascal marked the end of an era for Nvidia, because the GPU's successor (Turing) was the first to sport Tensor cores and ray tracing units, kick-starting the whole RTX shebang. Something else that the RTX 20-series cards pushed off the line was a noticeable hike in prices. The RTX 2080 Ti and RTX Titan, both released in 2018, were $999 and $2,499, respectively, and these days, all Nvidia models that use the biggest GPU in a given series are silly money.

I'm not suggesting that the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was cheap, because that's still a big slab of money to hand over for a GPU even now. But what you got for all thatcash was, and still is to some extent, extremely good.

Huang is absolutely right in saying that "it changed everything" because it marked a turning point when Nvidia realised that if PC gamers were happy to spend $699 on a graphics card, they would probably be just as happy to spend a bit more. And then more… and more. Until we're at the point where $699 will only get you a GeForce RTX 5070, although the RAMpocalyse is the biggest factor behind that.

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was indeed one of the best graphics cards Nvidia has ever made, but I suspect we will never see its like again.

Asus might be sticking 24 carat gold into its mice to celebrate its 20th anniversary and Gigabyte is slapping satellite-grade metals onto its motherboards for its own anniversary, but it's a diamond anniversary for MSI as it's jamming smooshed up diamonds into its next-gen GPU cooling solutions.

The next-gen graphics card cooler MSI had on-show at Computex today is a concept design for what the cards of tomorrow (or rather 2027 at the earliest) could look like. The new cooling feature set is estimated to cut maybe four degrees centigrade off the peak temperatures of a high-end GPU, but every little counts.

Those new features in short:

• Full metal fan blades
• Rifled heat pipes
• Diamond-composite thermal pads
• Diamond-copper composite contact plate

Switching from the plastic fan blades of its existing coolers means saying goodbye to potential warping of the blades at high speeds, allowing for a more rigid structure, which should reportedly increasing cooling efficiency.

And they feel really cool to the touch, too, though I wouldn't want to get a finger caught in one of them.

Maybe more interesting is the rifled barrels of the heatpipes MSI is using on this new design. Inside the pipes there is a spiral structure which increases the contact area inside them, allowing for greater thermal transfer as opposed to the regular design.

Then we come to the diamonds. Mixed inside both the heatpads sitting atop the expensive memory modules and the base plate of the cooling array itself, is a diamond powder designed to increase the thermal conductivity within both components. In the baseplate it's a diamond-copper composite and you can see in the images that it looks kinda dirty by comparison with the standard all-copper version. But it also sometimes sparkles in the light. And cools a bit better, apparently.

Now, as I said, these new features will only drop the temps by an approximate four degrees, but you've got to think that switching in more expensive materials and introducing more intricate manufacturing is only going to do one thing to the manufacturing price of associated cooling shrouds, and therefore to the price of the associate cards.

But this is a concept design in lieu of actual new GPUs to drool over, so while that RTX 5090 there does look pretty, you're not going to be able to buy one even if you did have the cash. Best just wait for the RTX 6090, eh?

The AMD RX 9070 GRE is probably the most 2026 graphics card any GPU company could release this year. With the possible exception of Nvidia digging down the back of the sofa again and releasing another RTX 3060. The RX 9070 GRE was previously a China-exclusive card and represents a dumbing down of the Navi 48 GPU with less of that expensive ol' VRAM. But the most damning aspect is the fact AMD has given this weaker card a global release at the same starting price as the beefier RX 9070.

I get the rationale—because of memory and silicon constraints, graphics card prices are all higher than they were when this card originally launched in China—but still, releasing a weaker GPU at the same initial MSRP as another card, which has a more fully functional version of the same chip, is never going to feel good. It's becoming a common phrase for me, but this is just another damning indictment of the state of PC gaming hardware in 2026.

This is a card very much released for right now, giving AMD more options for its Navi 48 silicon (especially for chips that don't make the grade for full RX 9070/XT cards) without needing to offer the full 16 GB monty. And it is priced for right now, too, with Nvidia's RTX 5070 available at $600 and the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB at $550. AMD is laser-focused on those two GeForce cards, but clearly also doesn't want to completely torpedo the RX 9070 by pricing it fully $100 lower at $499.

It is still an impressive card in its own right, getting mighty close to the RTX 5070 at stock speeds and regularly beating it with a simple, pain-free undervolt. So, while I'm not necessarily loving the optics of it being priced at the same MSRP as the unquestionably better RX 9070, it's the $550 card I would recommend right now, with the $50 delta between them being just enough. But if retailers lose their collective minds and regularly price it at the same level as the cheapest RX 9070 cards—which could absolutely happen, too—the RX 9070 GRE's value-proposition entirely evaporates.

Features

3.5

Performance

4

Thermals

4.5

Sound

4.5

Value

3

Software

4

Group 1 Data

Product	Features ()	Performance ()	Thermals ()	Sound ()	Value ()	Software ()
RX 9070 GRE (Acer Nitro)	3.5	4	4.5	4.5	3	4

We scored the RX 9070 GRE out of five in six distinct categories.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE features

Sporting the same Navi 48 GPU as both the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT, the GRE is obviously cut from the same silicon. Andy covered the RDNA 4 architecture in more depth in his tech dive, and I added some extra notes in my original RX 9070 XT review, too. The chip at the heart of this GRE, however, has lost another eight compute units (CUs) compared with the next card up, which in turn had lost eight CUs compared with the top-end RX 9070 XT. That means you're getting 3072 shaders, making it over 500 and 1000 shaders behind its other Navi 48 brethren respectively.

That theoretically allows AMD to use GPUs that may not have been able to run either 56 or 64 CUs at full speed to create another graphics card, and still get almost the same amount of cash for it, too. All it has to do is fuse off those errant, potentially dysfunctional CUs (too much to hope that it's a soft-block, potentially circumvented by some ingenious vBIOS hacks) and ship that GPU out as an RX 9070 GRE.

With 12 GB of GDDR6, as opposed to the 16 GB used by the other Navi 48 cards, and slower memory at that, AMD is also able to save on the manufacturing costs of the RX 9070 GRE. Which is vital right now given the skyrocketing pricing of memory, whether server, system, or video memory.

Like the other RDNA 4 GPUs, the RX 9070 GRE benefits from a drastically improved ray tracing engine, which means that these latest AMD cards are able to better deal with the rigours of that fancy lighting feature than any other Radeon GPU of times past. They're far closer to how Nvidia has been building and running its RT Cores, and that means they no longer lag so far behind GeForce cards in terms of ray traced gaming performance.

The other big feature of RDNA 4 is the support for FSR 4, AMD's most up to date, machine-learning powered upscaling engine. When it was first introduced it represented a step change in the Radeon upscaler, making FSR far closer to the image fidelity and stability that Nvidia's similar DLSS feature offers. But it wasn't built into a lot of games at the beginning, though that is starting to change, and will only grow as time moves on. Though it is notable that FSR support is still a secondary concern for many games developers, despite AMD's reports of how straightforward it is to implement.

Right now it is only available for RDNA 4 cards, but AMD is finally committing to opening support to RDNA 3 and later RDNA 2 GPUs.

Nipped and tucked, but RDNA 4 still delivers

Features

3.5

Group 1 Data

Product	Features ()
RX 9070 GRE (Acer Nitro)	3.5

AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE performance

While AMD's pricing of the RX 9070 GRE should point us towards the equivalently priced RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, for me it's the performance delta between the GRE and the straight RX 9070, and the delta between it and the RTX 5070, which are more interesting.

The Navi 48 GPU at its heart ought to be able to best an RTX 5060 Ti's GB206 GPU, which is getting on for half the size and with fewer than half the transistors inside it. I don't care that we're talking about 12 GB vs 16 GB in terms of memory, the RTX 5060 Ti with its 128-bit memory bus shows what a weak mid-range card it is at this price by comparison.

And so it is, at every level you're looking at around 15 - 20 fps dropped between the parity priced AMD and Nvidia cards. There is no contest.

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1080p gaming performance

Black Myth Wukong (1080p High)Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra)F1 24 (1080p Ultra high)Homeworld 3 (1080p Epic)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)The Talos Principle 2 (1080p Ultra)Total War: Warhammer 3 (1080p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

90

78

RX 9070 | 16 GB

103

89

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

95

82

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

75

65

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

73

63

Black Myth Wukong (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	90 Avg FPS, 78 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	103 Avg FPS, 89 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	95 Avg FPS, 82 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	75 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	73 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

63

52

RX 9070 | 16 GB

70

58

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

72

56

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

51

41

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

49

39

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	63 Avg FPS, 52 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	70 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	72 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	51 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	49 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

123

89

RX 9070 | 16 GB

138

108

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

123

96

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

90

71

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

95

61

F1 24 (1080p Ultra high) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	123 Avg FPS, 89 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	138 Avg FPS, 108 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	123 Avg FPS, 96 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	90 Avg FPS, 71 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	95 Avg FPS, 61 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

123

65

RX 9070 | 16 GB

125

62

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

125

64

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

117

65

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

106

65

Homeworld 3 (1080p Epic) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	123 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	125 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	125 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	117 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	106 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

124

80

RX 9070 | 16 GB

143

76

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

139

88

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

98

42

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

96

42

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	124 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	143 Avg FPS, 76 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	139 Avg FPS, 88 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	98 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	96 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

92

49

RX 9070 | 16 GB

106

74

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

92

57

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

75

41

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

73

37

The Talos Principle 2 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	92 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	106 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	92 Avg FPS, 57 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	75 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	73 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

102

46

RX 9070 | 16 GB

112

41

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

104

53

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

83

54

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

94

72

Total War: Warhammer 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	102 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	112 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	104 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	83 Avg FPS, 54 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	94 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS

The cheaper RX 9070 GRE is getting very close to the 1080p performance of the RX 9070, and it's practically a tie with the pricier Nvidia RTX 5070.

1440p gaming performance

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra)F1 24 (1440p Ultra High)Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra)Total War: Warhammer 3 (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

62

55

RX 9070 | 16 GB

73

64

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

68

60

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

51

45

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

48

44

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	62 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	73 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	68 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	51 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	48 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

38

23

RX 9070 | 16 GB

43

36

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

45

36

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

32

26

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

30

24

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	38 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	43 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	45 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	30 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

81

52

RX 9070 | 16 GB

90

67

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

78

60

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

56

45

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

60

46

F1 24 (1440p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	81 Avg FPS, 52 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	90 Avg FPS, 67 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	78 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	56 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	60 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

101

61

RX 9070 | 16 GB

104

62

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

112

64

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

97

64

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

86

65

Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	101 Avg FPS, 61 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	104 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	112 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	97 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	86 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

92

63

RX 9070 | 16 GB

107

74

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

100

68

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

72

34

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

71

34

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	92 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	107 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	100 Avg FPS, 68 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	72 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	71 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

61

22

RX 9070 | 16 GB

74

53

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

64

42

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

51

32

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

49

35

The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	61 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	74 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	64 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	51 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	49 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

82

51

RX 9070 | 16 GB

96

43

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

81

53

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

60

44

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

62

45

Total War: Warhammer 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	96 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	81 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	60 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	62 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS

As the resolution gets higher, the performance delta between the RX 9070 GRE and RTX 5070 does increase, but it's still not huge.

4K gaming performance

Black Myth Wukong (4K High)Cyberpunk 2077 (4K RT Ultra)F1 24 (4K Ultra High)Homeworld 3 (4K Epic)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (4K Ultra)The Talos Principle 2 (4K Ultra)Total War: Warhammer 3 (4K Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

33

30

RX 9070 | 16 GB

40

30

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

37

30

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

28

25

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

25

22

Black Myth Wukong (4K High) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	33 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	40 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	37 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	28 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	25 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

10

5

RX 9070 | 16 GB

20

17

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

21

17

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

15

12

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

14

11

Cyberpunk 2077 (4K RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	10 Avg FPS, 5 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	20 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	21 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	15 Avg FPS, 12 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	14 Avg FPS, 11 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

33

23

RX 9070 | 16 GB

44

32

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

39

30

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

27

21

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

30

22

F1 24 (4K Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	33 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	44 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	39 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	27 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	30 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

63

50

RX 9070 | 16 GB

72

56

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

79

55

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

58

50

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

46

41

Homeworld 3 (4K Epic) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	63 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	72 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	79 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	58 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	46 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

52

35

RX 9070 | 16 GB

62

47

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

57

44

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

42

20

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

41

21

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (4K Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	52 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	62 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	57 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	42 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	41 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

26

10

RX 9070 | 16 GB

39

24

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

35

24

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

27

18

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

25

19

The Talos Principle 2 (4K Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	26 Avg FPS, 10 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	39 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	35 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	27 Avg FPS, 18 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	25 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

42

29

RX 9070 | 16 GB

52

36

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

44

30

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

33

22

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

30

20

Total War: Warhammer 3 (4K Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	42 Avg FPS, 29 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	44 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	33 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	30 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS

Neither the RX 9070 GRE nor RTX 5070 are native 4K GPUs, and the Nvidia card still holds sway, but again it is close.

But the pricier RTX 5070 and RX 9070 are interesting in just how close they are in performance terms to the RX 9070 GRE. Against the RTX 5070 the two cards are not far off being on a level, trading blows across parts of our benchmarking suite. On the whole, though you'd have to say the Nvidia card more consistently leads the GRE overall, but there's surprisingly little in it, certainly not enough that you'd actually feel it in most games. It is clear, however, that the 3584 core Navi 48 chip inside the straight RX 9070—with its 16 GB VRAM quotient and 256-bit memory bus—is absolutely the better option.

Upscaled gaming performance

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High + Upscaling (quality))Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra + upscaling (quality))F1 24 (1440p Ultra high +upscaling (Quality), 2x FG)Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic + upscaling (quality))The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra +upscaling (quality), 2x FG)

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

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High + Upscaling (quality)) Data

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

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

130

78

RX 9070 | 16 GB

149

102

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

122

97

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

96

79

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

102

73

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra + upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	130 Avg FPS, 78 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	149 Avg FPS, 102 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	122 Avg FPS, 97 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	96 Avg FPS, 79 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	102 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

249

122

RX 9070 | 16 GB

261

114

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

176

113

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

136

89

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

190

113

F1 24 (1440p Ultra high +upscaling (Quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	249 Avg FPS, 122 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	261 Avg FPS, 114 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	176 Avg FPS, 113 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	136 Avg FPS, 89 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	190 Avg FPS, 113 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

115

63

RX 9070 | 16 GB

123

64

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

127

63

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

118

63

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

110

62

Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic + upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	115 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	123 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	127 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	118 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	110 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

164

60

RX 9070 | 16 GB

197

90

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

144

65

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

115

41

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

135

59

The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra +upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	164 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | 16 GB	197 Avg FPS, 90 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	144 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	115 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	135 Avg FPS, 59 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.

Though the GRE is still not far off, and if the price gap between either the RX 9070 or RTX 5070 increases then the GRE will become a more tempting option. At MSRP vs. current pricing of the RX 9070 specifically, with the GRE you're getting roughly 86% of the performance, but you are paying around 92% of the price.

At the higher resolutions the GRE notably struggles against the other two cards, though if you're aiming specifically for 4K gaming with anything in the $600 range you are 100% relying on some heavy upscaling. At 1440p though it still shines.

Undervolting performance

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High)Black Myth Wukong (1440p High + Upscaling (quality))Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra + upscaling (quality))F1 24 (1440p Ultra High)F1 24 (1440p Ultra high +upscaling (Quality), 2x FG)Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic)Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic + upscaling (quality))Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra)The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra +upscaling (quality), 2x FG)Total War: Warhammer 3 (1440p Ultra)

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

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High) Data

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

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

103

89

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

95

82

RX 9070 | Stock

111

96

RTX 5070 | Stock

107

81

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High + Upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	103 Avg FPS, 89 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	95 Avg FPS, 82 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	111 Avg FPS, 96 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	107 Avg FPS, 81 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

44

34

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

38

23

RX 9070 | Stock

43

36

RTX 5070 | Stock

45

36

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	44 Avg FPS, 34 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	38 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	43 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	45 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

145

73

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

130

78

RX 9070 | Stock

149

102

RTX 5070 | Stock

122

97

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra + upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	145 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	130 Avg FPS, 78 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	149 Avg FPS, 102 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	122 Avg FPS, 97 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

89

49

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

81

52

RX 9070 | Stock

90

67

RTX 5070 | Stock

78

60

F1 24 (1440p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	89 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	81 Avg FPS, 52 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	90 Avg FPS, 67 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	78 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

262

126

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

249

122

RX 9070 | Stock

261

114

RTX 5070 | Stock

176

113

F1 24 (1440p Ultra high +upscaling (Quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	262 Avg FPS, 126 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	249 Avg FPS, 122 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	261 Avg FPS, 114 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	176 Avg FPS, 113 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

103

63

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

101

61

RX 9070 | Stock

104

62

RTX 5070 | Stock

112

64

Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	103 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	101 Avg FPS, 61 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	104 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	112 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

118

64

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

115

63

RX 9070 | Stock

123

64

RTX 5070 | Stock

127

63

Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic + upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	118 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	115 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	123 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	127 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

101

68

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

92

63

RX 9070 | Stock

107

74

RTX 5070 | Stock

100

68

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	101 Avg FPS, 68 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	92 Avg FPS, 63 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	107 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	100 Avg FPS, 68 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

65

35

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

61

22

RX 9070 | Stock

74

53

RTX 5070 | Stock

64

42

The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	65 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	61 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	74 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	64 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

183

69

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

164

60

RX 9070 | Stock

197

90

RTX 5070 | Stock

144

65

The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra +upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	183 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	164 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	197 Avg FPS, 90 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	144 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem

91

48

RX 9070 GRE | Stock

82

51

RX 9070 | Stock

96

43

RTX 5070 | Stock

81

53

Total War: Warhammer 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | Undervolted | -130mV | 2700 Mem	91 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 GRE | Stock	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
RX 9070 | Stock	96 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
RTX 5070 | Stock	81 Avg FPS, 53 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.

The pricing maths start to make more sense when you factor in the level of performance headroom built into this card, however. With a little oh-so-simple undervolt I was able to push the RX 9070 GRE with a few percentage points of the performance of the RX 9070. And with the GPU consistently topping the 3 GHz mark, you're looking at generally a performance lead over the RTX 5070, too.

I still find the performance headroom of Navi 48 GPUs surprising, and while AMD's lower order RX 9000-series cards don't have as consistent a level of overclocking/undervolting performance to them, every Navi 48-powered card I've tested is happy to let you pull back its core voltage in exchange for giving up a whole lot more clock speed and around 10% extra frame rate performance in games.

Undervolt and watch it fly

Performance

4

Group 1 Data

Product	Performance ()
RX 9070 GRE (Acer Nitro)	4

AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE thermals

It's probably no surprise that a mid-range graphics card sporting a triple fan cooling array actually trends to the pretty chill, but that's where we're at with at least the Acer Nitro RX 9070 GRE I've been testing. There are no Made by AMD (MBA) cards for this generation, so all RDNA 4 GPUs are clothed in their manufacturer's cooling shrouds, and you're likely to be getting arrays designed for beefier cards slapped onto the RX 9070 GRE.

System performance

ThermalsGPU frequencyPowerPerformance per watt

Peak temperature (°C)

Average temperature (°C)

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

62

59

RX 9070 | 16 GB

57

55

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

79

76

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

67

65

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

57

48

Thermals Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	62 Peak temperature (°C), 59 Average temperature (°C)
RX 9070 | 16 GB	57 Peak temperature (°C), 55 Average temperature (°C)
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	79 Peak temperature (°C), 76 Average temperature (°C)
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	67 Peak temperature (°C), 65 Average temperature (°C)
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	57 Peak temperature (°C), 48 Average temperature (°C)

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

2674

RX 9070 | 16 GB

2349

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

2693

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

2687

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

2849

GPU frequency Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	2674
RX 9070 | 16 GB	2349
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	2693
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	2687
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	2849

Peak power (watts)

Average power (watts)

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

287

244

RX 9070 | 16 GB

270

248

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

284

251

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

207

182

RX 9060 XT | 16 GB

182

146

Power Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	287 Peak power (watts), 244 Average power (watts)
RX 9070 | 16 GB	270 Peak power (watts), 248 Average power (watts)
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	284 Peak power (watts), 251 Average power (watts)
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	207 Peak power (watts), 182 Average power (watts)
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	182 Peak power (watts), 146 Average power (watts)

4K frames per J

1080p frame per J

RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB

0.22

0.53

RX 9070 | 16 GB

0.26

0.6

RTX 5070 | 12 GB

0.24

0.61

RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB

0.23

0.62

Performance per watt Data

Product	Value
RX 9070 GRE | 12 GB	0.22 4K frames per J, 0.53 1080p frame per J
RX 9070 | 16 GB	0.26 4K frames per J, 0.6 1080p frame per J
RTX 5070 | 12 GB	0.24 4K frames per J, 0.61 1080p frame per J
RTX 5060 Ti | 16 GB	0.23 4K frames per J, 0.62 1080p frame per J
RX 9060 XT | 16 GB	N/A

The RX 9070 GRE uses the same coolers as the RX 9070/XT cards, with more power-hungry GPUs, the cooling noise and thermal load is impressively light.

From what I can tell, without having the cards cheek-by-jowl, this Acer GRE is using the exact same Frostblade 4.0 cooler as its RX 9070 XT stablemate, and I've tested at a solid ~60°C when under load. That makes it cooler than the similarly triple-fanned Palit RTX 5060 Ti we've tested, and waaaaaay cooler than the Founders Edition RTX 5070.

And that's true whether you indulge in undervolting or not. I actually found it running a teensy bit more frosty when I'd pulled back the power, even though the GPU is generally running at over 300 MHz faster than at stock levels.

Chillers built for better GPUs means cool GPUs

Thermals

4.5

Group 1 Data

Product	Thermals ()
RX 9070 GRE (Acer Nitro)	4.5

AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE sound

I have found only the tiniest smattering of coil whine. That's something I regularly listen out for with AMD GPUs, and in this generation with Nvidia cards, too. But, with the RX 9070 GRE I've been testing, I'm only detecting the very occasional electrical fizz when the frame rate in a settings screen spikes to ludicrous levels—in games I never heard the power componentry sing its siren song.

The actual fan noise is blessedly relaxed, too. The GPU may be running cool, but it's not because Acer has tuned those three fans to run at turbine settings. Even under sustained load, and even with the card sitting in an open test rig right next to me, the fan noise never got to a distracting level at all.

It will sound different in a closed PC case, though there should also be moving air around and/or across the GPU to help shift that hot air, too.

Cool also means quiet

Sound

4.5

Group 1 Data

Product	Sound ()
RX 9070 GRE (Acer Nitro)	4.5

AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE value