Facepalm: China just lately unveiled its first gaming GPU, the Lisuan G100. Constructed on a 6nm course of, the cardboard was touted as a possible rival to Nvidia’s RTX 4060. Nevertheless, a latest Geekbench itemizing suggests its efficiency is nearer to that of the 13-year-old GeForce GTX 660 Ti or the 10-year-old Radeon R9 370.
The itemizing additionally seems to disclose shockingly anemic specs, together with simply 32 Compute Items, 256 MB of VRAM, and a 300 MHz GPU clock. General, the cardboard managed a rating of solely 15,524 factors in OpenCL, making it one of many worst-performing GPUs within the Geekbench database.
On the floor, the specs and benchmark outcomes recommend that the G100 is a severely underpowered GPU – a minimum of a decade behind fashionable choices from Nvidia and AMD. Nevertheless, it appears unlikely {that a} 6nm card would really ship with such outdated {hardware} in 2025.
What possible occurred right here is that the take a look at was carried out throughout the sampling stage, the place unoptimized firmware and drivers resulted within the low reported VRAM and clock speeds. As for the FP32 efficiency, it might’t be precisely decided with out figuring out the GPU’s execution unit subsystem configuration.
The take a look at mattress for the G100 featured a Ryzen 7 8700G CPU and 64 GB of DDR5-4800 reminiscence put in on a Colourful Battle-AX B650M-Plus motherboard. Apparently, the PC was operating Home windows 10 as an alternative of Home windows 11.
Lisuan Expertise introduced final month that it had efficiently powered on its prototype G100 GPU. Primarily based on the corporate’s in-house TrueGPU structure, the chip is manufactured on a 6nm-grade course of, probably by the Shanghai-based semiconductor foundry SMIC.
Lisuan describes the G100 as China’s first indigenous 6nm GPU and claims it is going to ship efficiency on par with Nvidia’s RTX 4060. Whereas the Geekbench itemizing suggests it might fall nicely in need of that concentrate on, the retail items will possible ship with optimized firmware and drivers that higher showcase the {hardware}’s true capabilities.
It is unclear when the G100 will hit the market, however on-line hypothesis factors to mass manufacturing beginning later this yr or early subsequent yr. Whether or not the GPU can ship the efficiency, stability, and effectivity initially promised by Lisuan stays to be seen, however extra particulars will possible emerge within the coming weeks and months.
