ChipFlip
$25.50. That's all that separates the PowerColor RX 7900 GRE from the XFX RX 9070 used, $549.50 against $575. One is AMD's cut-down former flagship trim. The other is the newer mid-range card built to replace it. At a $25.50 gap, price barely factors into the decision.
The GRE was AMD's flagship-adjacent play
RDNA3's 7900 GRE used cut-down flagship silicon to hit a lower price point without being a true flagship itself. It's genuinely fast, close to a 7900 XT in a lot of workloads, and it's been sitting at increasingly attractive used prices as the market's attention moves to newer cards.
The 9070 is a different design philosophy
RDNA4 wasn't built to chase the top of the stack. AMD aimed the 9070 at strong price-to-performance in the upper-mid tier, with real architectural gains in ray tracing and upscaling over the previous generation. It won't out-brute-force a true last-gen flagship, but it doesn't need to.
Raw rasterized performance between these two lands close enough that neither one is a clear knockout. Where the 9070 pulls ahead is ray tracing and AMD's newer FSR implementation, both of which the GRE's older architecture handles noticeably worse.
So does the flagship pedigree matter
Less than you'd expect. A card's original flagship status doesn't carry into resale value once a newer architecture exists at a similar price, and this pairing shows exactly that: two cards, $25.50 apart, where the story is architecture and features, not "which one used to cost more."
Bottom line
At a gap this small, buy the 9070 unless you specifically don't care about ray tracing or newer upscaling. The GRE's flagship pedigree isn't worth chasing when the price difference has already collapsed to $25.50.