Despite obvious Chinese progress, the American GPU giants can still sleep soundly.
Until a few years ago, China was "just" trying to get rid of American control over certain segments of its economy. Today, this issue is of almost vital importance, as US economic sanctions prevent the export of such sensitive products. This is particularly true for the most powerful processors and graphics processors from manufacturers such as AMD, Intel or NVIDIA. This is also the case for the machines used to engrave these most modern chips, designed by ASML, a Dutch company.
In fact, Beijing is pushing all of its semiconductor companies and the results are palpable in many areas, with, for example, numerous advances in supercomputing or quantum computing. In a slightly different area, just a few weeks ago, Moore Threads presented the first GPU capable of supporting the recently introduced PCI Express 5.0 standard. In this respect, its MTT S80 has no equivalent from AMD or NVIDIA.
On the left, an MTT S80-based card and, on the right, a GeForce GT 1030
The BullLabs YouTube channel is the first to get their hands on this MTT S80 and do a pretty thorough review. Of course, the goal was to see what this GPU has in the belly and how it could - or not - compete with GeForce RTX and other Radeon RX. There's no need to keep the suspense going any longer: it's clearly not capable of competing with any of the more modern GPUs from the American giants in the sector. At least not on the applications most commonly used to evaluate a GPU presented as " dedicated to video games ".
Despite the impressive graphics card that incorporates the MTT S80, the presence of a three-fan cooling system and the use of 16GB of video memory, Moore Threads' baby is barely able to offer performance on the level of a GeForce GT 1030, an entry-level graphics card based on NVIDIA's Pascal architecture and released in 2017. First, BullLabs confirms that the MTT S80 is currently unable to support games beyond DirectX 9 and can't do tessellation, which is a pretty basic function.
Of course, it's the performance we're interested in, and here again, the results are not flattering. On League of Legends or Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, the MTT S80 is far behind the GeForce GT 1030, with which it is only on par with Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Even more annoying, despite its modest performance, the MTT S80 is a power hog. Its power consumption is measured at 252 Watts, which is much more than a GeForce RTX 3060, whose performance is obviously not comparable. In fact, that's more than twice the power consumption of the GeForce GTX 1060 and more than eight times the power consumption of the GeForce GT 1030. There is still a long way to go..
