Despite the rather outrageous price tag for a first-ever GPU, the results are far from catastrophic.
Chinese start-up Lisuan Tech has been making headlines for over a year now: it is said to be the first Chinese company to design/produce a DirectX 12 GPU capable of running games such as Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077, Forza Horizon 5 or Horizon Forbidden West. This GPU powers the LX 7G100 card, which has just been launched in China. The Chaowanke Youtube channel got its hands on a copy and tells us all the good (?) things to think about it. Well, " tells us " is an overstatement, as the language barrier (the video is in Chinese) makes itself felt despite the use of automatic subtitles.
For this test, Chaowanke set up a classic machine: an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor was installed on an MSI MPG X870E EDGE TI Wi-Fi motherboard, and two 16GB DDR5-6000 BiWin Timewalker chipsets completed the configuration. Next, a large number of measurements were carried out, first on the multiple 3DMark scenes and then using several games. Far from the promise of a card as powerful as a GeForce RTX 4060, the 3DMark measurements put the LX 7G100 on a par with a GeForce RTX 3060. Remember that Lisuan Tech had to create everything, and that the chip is only etched in 6nm by SMIC. For a first attempt at a graphics card, it's already interesting to have something perfectly functional, capable of running all the games of the moment.
As far as games are concerned, it's a pity that Chaowanke didn't renew its entire protocol: the LX 7G100 is indeed well behind the GeForce RTX 4060, the ARC B580 and the Radeon RX 6600 XT, but it's no longer compared to the RTX 3060, which would undoubtedly have allowed it to shine even brighter. Another point to bear in mind is that Lisuan Tech is charging a hefty price for its first graphics card: after conversion, we're talking about around 420 euros, i.e. close to the price of a GeForce RTX 5060. So, while AMD, Intel and NVIDIA won't be wavering today, the fact remains that this LX 7G100 demonstrates the remarkable progress made by the Chinese semiconductor industry.
