The Past and Present of Domestic Gaming Graphics Cards

Last summer, the craze for *Black Myth: Wukong* swept across every corner of the country. The craze broke through traditional boundaries to become a cultural phenomenon, inspiring people to purchase new hardware to experience the AAA-quality appeal of *Black Myth: Wukong*.

Three days after the release of *Black Myth: Wukong*, the Moore Threads driver team worked around the clock to release a special driver optimized for the game. With the new driver in place, the Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card is finally capable of running this major Chinese AAA title, though the performance is somewhat underwhelming:

“At 1080p resolution, with low graphics settings and TSR upscaling enabled in Performance mode, the frame rate barely stays stable at 30–40 frames per second.”

In actual testing, the MTT S80 graphics card clearly lags far behind NVIDIA’s then-mid-range “sweet spot” card, the RTX 4060. However, for Moore Threads, the fact that its first-generation gaming graphics card can run the latest and most cutting-edge domestic AAA titles smoothly is already a milestone achievement.

On December 5, Moore Threads—nicknamed “China’s NVIDIA”—made its debut on the STAR Market. Its stock surged 425% on the first day of trading, and its market capitalization exceeded 300 billion yuan at the close, placing it among the top five companies by market capitalization on the STAR Market.

Although the MTT S80 graphics card lags behind the market leaders in performance, its designer—Moore Threads—embodies the long-held aspiration of China’s semiconductor industry to achieve self-reliance and control, with the aim of breaking through the monopoly held by NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.

Players are also eager to see domestic gaming graphics cards go head-to-head with the international giants. They’ve had enough of the half-hearted efforts from that “sly businessman” Huang (NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang).

01

Former NVIDIA China employees launch startup; Tencent and Century Huatong both hold stakes

Back in 2020, the technologically advanced United States unleashed its ultimate weapon: a chip export ban.

Driven by strong demand for self-reliance and control, a wave of startups specializing in GPU R&D—such as Xintong Semiconductor, Birun Technology, and Muxi Technology—have sprung up one after another.

Zhang Jianzhong, then NVIDIA’s Global Vice President and General Manager for China, decided to leave the company and, along with several colleagues who had worked at NVIDIA, founded Moore Threads.

Zhang Jianzhong during his time at NVIDIA

Within Moore Threads’ management team, Zhou Yuan, who previously oversaw the market ecosystem at NVIDIA China, serves as CFO; Zhang Yubo, a former GPU architect at NVIDIA, serves as CTO; Wang Dong, a former sales director at NVIDIA, serves as vice president; and Yang Shangshan, head of the Drivers and Software Department, is also a former GPU architect at NVIDIA.

Lin Shuo, a semiconductor industry professional, told Game Teahouse that there are very few GPU architects at NVIDIA in China, noting that “there have been only a handful in the entire history of the Shanghai office.”

Thanks to its impressive track record, Moore Threads secured two rounds of funding within 100 days of its founding, achieving a valuation of over $1 billion.

ByteDance and Tencent both participated in Moore Threads’ early-stage financing. Century Huatong, meanwhile, invested in Moore Threads indirectly through an industrial fund managed by Guosheng Capital.

However, ByteDance was unable to fully capitalize on the benefits of Moore Threads’ IPO. In January of this year, ByteDance sold its stake in Moore Threads to Dian Shi Capital for a total of 177 million yuan.

With strong financial backing, Moore Threads adopted a strategy of “partially purchasing IP and partially developing it in-house,” launching its first GPU architecture—Su Di—within 18 months of its founding, while simultaneously developing its second-generation “Chunxiao” and third-generation “Quyuan” architectures.

Moore Threads has named its GPU architectures after the “Ten Scenes of West Lake,” aiming to convey the idea of using GPU technology to digitally recreate the world’s most beautiful real-life landscapes. Compared to simple “letter-and-number” combinations, this approach carries a romantic flair unique to Chinese culture, creating a memorable brand identity.

Naming GPU architectures after the Ten Scenes of West Lake has a distinctly romantic touch

02

Selling graphics cards at a loss, with gaming performance on par with the 1050

In the second half of 2022, the mining craze subsided, and the long-inflated graphics card price structure finally collapsed. Two years after the release of the RTX 30 series, gamers finally had the chance to buy new cards at their original prices.

As one might expect, consumers have long harbored deep resentment toward the two GPU giants, NVIDIA and AMD.

In November of that year, Moore Threads unveiled its first domestically produced gaming graphics card, the MTT S80, at its fall launch event. This marked the entry of a new player into the consumer GPU market.

Unlike most domestic GPU manufacturers, which focus on general-purpose computing capabilities at the expense of graphics performance, Moore Threads has designed a fully-featured GPU. A single GPU can handle multiple tasks, including graphics rendering, high-definition video decoding, AI computing acceleration, and physics simulation.

Moore Threads believes that gaming technology itself serves as an excellent testing ground for high-tech innovations, capable of rapidly integrating cutting-edge technologies. This is what prompted them to launch their gaming graphics cards.

The MTT S80 features the second-generation “Chunxiao” architecture (7nm process), with 4,096 stream processors, 32 tensor cores, and 256 rasterization units, a base clock speed of 1.8 GHz, and 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

Its single-precision floating-point performance reaches 14.7 TFlops, which is comparable to the RTX 3060 in terms of theoretical performance. However, theoretical performance is just that—theoretical—and actual in-game performance is a completely different story:

In benchmarks such as 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy, the S80 scored slightly lower than the GTX 1060; in actual gaming tests, the S80’s performance was closer to that of the GTX 1050.

This gap between theory and practice stems primarily from the fact that driver compatibility has not yet been fully optimized.

Lin Shuo explained to Game Teahouse that the main challenges in driver development lie in supporting various game standard interfaces and optimizing performance.

Game developers can bypass the game engine and call the graphics card’s low-level APIs directly to improve performance. However, this requires specific optimizations in the game.

Although driver developers can further unlock the graphics card’s potential by analyzing how games are rendered, fixing runtime bugs, and optimizing shader compilation efficiency.

Although Moore Threads’ MUSA architecture is compatible with NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture, the actual efficiency of CUDA code translation is low. This may be another major reason why the S80’s actual gaming performance falls far short of that of the RTX 3060.

There’s no doubt that the MTT S80 isn’t a fully mature graphics card. Gamers can sense the S80’s immaturity in many ways.

For example, the S80 does not use the PCIe 8-pin power connector commonly found on graphics cards, but instead borrows power from the CPU’s 8-pin connector; even under no-load conditions, its idle power consumption exceeds 100W.

The S80 actually uses the CPU’s 8-pin power connector

When the MTT S80 was first released, it was bundled with an ASUS motherboard to ensure compatibility and priced at 2,999 yuan. This works out to a unit price of around 1,800 yuan for the S80. Clearly, at this price point and with this level of performance, it was difficult to attract gamers to purchase it.

Moore Threads’ prospectus reveals that its consumer-grade graphics cards are not only selling poorly but are also being sold at a loss.

In 2023, sales of Moore Threads’ gaming graphics cards (S80 and S70) through its JD.com-operated store totaled 3.9914 million yuan. Including workstation graphics cards and high-end office graphics cards, Moore Threads sold a total of 11,700 consumer-grade graphics cards for the year.

The JD.com store specializes in selling gaming graphics cards.

That year, the consumer graphics card business posted a gross loss of 20 million, which meant that “every card sold resulted in a loss.”

In response, Moore Threads acknowledged that “fierce competition from international brands has put significant pressure on the company’s product pricing.”

Realistically speaking, catching up to NVIDIA won’t happen overnight, but as long as we stay in the race, there’s still a chance we can catch up.

However, the sudden fall of the Iron Curtain across the ocean nearly made the MTT S80 the swan song of domestic gaming graphics cards.

03

Sanctions caused a shortage of graphics cards; after lying low for two years, driver updates have resumed

In October 2023, just as Moore Threads was preparing to launch its third-generation “Quyuan” architecture products, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) added Moore Threads to the Entity List.

This has disrupted Moore Threads’ R&D schedule: not only has it become difficult to procure certain key raw materials, but the company can no longer use TSMC’s advanced manufacturing processes. Even advance payments made to overseas suppliers have been frozen, forcing the company to write off the losses.

Moore Threads’ management quickly adjusted its strategy: on the one hand, it optimized its organizational structure and scaled back its consumer-grade business; on the other hand, it actively sought domestic manufacturing partners to promote localization and minimize the impact as much as possible.

The new gaming GPU currently in production, having lost the support of advanced manufacturing processes, is now doomed to never see the light of day.

Although there has been a shortage of gaming graphics cards, Moore Threads has continued to make steady progress in providing driver support for existing models. Over the past two years, Moore Threads has released 24 driver updates, supporting compatibility with over a thousand games.

With expanded compatibility, the S80 is no longer tied to the purchase of an ASUS motherboard and can be purchased directly for 1,499 yuan.

The S80 was priced at $1,299 during the sale

When the MTT S80 was first released, it actually only supported DirectX 9c. After more than two years of continuous effort by the R&D team, the S80 now supports DirectX 11, and a beta driver for DirectX 12 has also been released.

Popular domestic games such as *Honkai: Star Rail*, *Genshin Impact*, *Operation Delta*, *Mingchao*, and *The Sixteen States of Yan Yun* have all been specially optimized. Recently released AAA titles such as *Kazan* and *Black Myth: Wukong* have also received dedicated optimizations.

However, when running new games that haven’t been specifically optimized—such as *The Late Ming: Feathers of the Abyss*—the frame rate hovers between 15 and 20 even with all settings set to low at 1080p, making it impossible to play smoothly.

In the absence of proactive optimization by game developers, Moore Threads has no choice but to optimize each game individually, which is an extremely arduous task.

04

The story of domestic gaming graphics cards is far from over

Since 2023, Moore Threads has dedicated itself entirely to the research and development of AI computing cards, releasing its third-generation “Quyuan” GPU architecture and fourth-generation “Pinghu” architecture at a pace of one iteration per year, and has already begun product shipments.

Moore Threads KUAE Cluster Unit

In the first half of this year, Moore Threads’ AI computing card business generated revenue of 665 million yuan, accounting for 94.85% of total revenue.

Game Teahouse has learned that, since server clusters have a higher tolerance for the power consumption and cost of computing cards, Moore Threads can simply stack GPU cores to achieve exponential growth in computing power. Clearly, this approach of simply stacking cores does not apply to gaming graphics cards.

But the market niche that Moore Threads carved out has since attracted a flood of other challengers. The story of domestic gaming graphics cards is far from over.

Moore Threads raised 8 billion yuan in its IPO, with 2.5 billion yuan earmarked for R&D on next-generation graphics GPUs, which will be used to produce consumer-grade graphics cards for gaming.

Early employees of S3 Graphics, the first-generation graphics industry leader, founded Lisan Technology two years ago, making it a new entrant in the domestic gaming graphics card market. CEO Xuan Yifang previously served as Vice President of R&D at S3, where he led and oversaw the mass production of 15 generations of GPU chips, playing a key role in S3’s early success; CTO Niu Yixin was the lead engineer for ViRGE, the first-generation 3D acceleration chip.

In July of this year, Lishan Technology released its first GPU chip series, the 7G100 (6nm process). Among them, the gaming GPU chip 7G106 delivers 24 TFlops of single-precision floating-point performance, placing it between the RTX 4060 Ti and 5060 Ti; its actual 3DMark scores are comparable to those of the RTX 4060.

Lishan Technology has even developed NRSS super-resolution technology, which rivals DLSS and FSR.

In the official demo released by Lisan Technology, *Black Myth: Wukong* achieved an average frame rate of over 70 fps at 1080p with high graphics settings; *Shadow of the Tomb Raider* achieved an average frame rate of over 80 fps with maximum graphics settings; and the recently released *Late Ming* runs smoothly without any issues.

According to Lisan Technology’s schedule, the 7G106 will enter mass production in September. If all goes according to plan, this domestically produced gaming graphics card could hit the market early next year.

Jingjiawei, which had previously focused on military graphics and display control systems, disclosed during its 2023 financing round that the funds raised would be used to develop a new generation of high-performance general-purpose GPUs suitable for large-scale games and professional graphics rendering.

Muxi Technology, founded by former AMD China scientists, announced in 2022 that it would launch a graphics rendering GPU in 2025. Its official website also mentions the Xicai G-series GPUs for cloud gaming. However, according to the prospectus, this series has only “completed the IP design and verification of the GPU,” with no actual products yet released. Furthermore, gaming-related applications are not mentioned in the fundraising plans, suggesting the project may have been shelved.

05

Domestic gaming graphics cards still have a long way to go

Looking back on the MTT S80’s bumpy journey from conception to market launch, its significance extends far beyond the mere performance of a graphics card. Moore Threads’ pioneering efforts have achieved a breakthrough in China’s domestic graphics card industry, taking it from nothing to something.

First, figure out if it exists; then, figure out if it’s any good.

In fact, starting with the RTX 4090, the full-power versions of Nvidia’s flagship graphics cards have become unavailable in China. Given the performance caps set by the U.S., will we soon be unable to purchase even the next-tier flagships or mid-to-high-end graphics cards?

The ever-growing list of games supported by the S80, and the slow but steady progress from DX9 to DX11—these seemingly clumsy efforts deserve respect rather than flippant mockery.

We must recognize that Moore Threads’ annual R&D investment amounts to little more than 1 billion yuan, which is an order of magnitude smaller than NVIDIA’s investment of tens of billions of dollars. The growth of domestic GPU manufacturers still depends on long-term support and patient financial backing from the capital markets and society at large.

The breakthrough in domestic GPUs is by no means something a single design company can achieve on its own. It relies on the coordinated efforts of the entire industry chain, from high-end lithography machines and semiconductor materials to manufacturing processes.

Even a slow horse can cover ten stages if it never gives up. The road ahead for domestic gaming graphics cards is long and arduous.