a Reviews posted on EXPreview presents for the first time the MTT S80 graphics card, a new mid-range gaming competitor from Chinese GPU maker Moore Thread. This GPU is one of Moore Thread’s most powerful graphics cards to date, with a triple-fan cooler setup that theoretically makes him compete with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.
For starters, Moore Thread is a Chinese GPU maker that was founded just two years ago in 2020. The company reportedly leverages some of the most experienced talent in his GPU industry, hiring experts and engineers from Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel and Arm. others. Moore Thread’s aim is to create a homegrown (for China) GPU solution that is completely independent from the West. They are envisioned to be capable of 3D graphics, AI training, inference computing, and high-performance parallel computing capabilities, and will be used in China’s consumer and government sectors.
The MTT S80 graphics card was developed using Moore Thread’s “Chunxaio” GPU architecture. It supports FP32, FP16 and INT8 (integer) precision calculations and is compatible with the company’s MUSA computing platform. This architecture also employs a full video engine that supports H.264, H.265 (HEVC) and AV1 codecs, and can handle up to 8K video encoding and decoding.
MTT S80 comes with fully unlocked Chunxaio GPU cores, featuring 4096 MUSA cores and 128 tensor cores, running at 1800 MHz. The memory subsystem uses a 14 Gbps GDDR6 module running on a 256-bit wide bus and has a capacity of 16 GB. As far as specs go, it looks decent, at least on paper.
The GPU runs at a target board power rating of 255W and is powered by both the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and a single 8-pin EPS12V power connector — yes, it uses CPU EPS12V instead of 8-pin PEG (PCI Express Graphics) . connector. This is because the EPS12V can deliver up to 300W. For users without an additional EPS12V connector, the card includes a dual 8-pin PEG to single 8-pin EPS12V adapter. For the record, this is more power than he RTX 3070 needs.
The display output will consist of three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors and one HDMI 2.1 port, similar to those found on most Nvidia GeForce GPUs in the RTX 40 and 30 series families. The graphics card has a silver shroud and is accented with a matte black design that surrounds the left and right fans. The cooler features a triple-fan cooler design with two large outer fans and a smaller central fan in the middle. The dimensions of the card are 286mm long and 2 slots wide.
RTX 3060 beats MTT S80 in early benchmarks
A previous report on the Chunxaio GPU suggests it could achieve FP32 performance similar to the RTX 3060 Ti. The 3060 Ti has a theoretical throughput of 16.2 teraflops, while the Chunxaio has a theoretical throughput of 14.7 TFLOPS.This is a little lower than Nvidia, but with twice the VRAM capacity, the hardware is at least appears It can compete with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti.
Unfortunately, according to EXPreview, the MTT S80 has very poor driver optimization. MTT S80 is raw computing he’s going for the RTX 3060 Ti in terms of his performance but in gaming benchmarks he’s reported that Nvidia’s RTX 3060 significantly outperforms his MTT S80 I’m here. The problem with testing is that they don’t provide comparison charts for games using the RTX 3060 or other GPUs. Only textual descriptions of actual game performance are provided, but charts are for odd combinations of titles.
EXPreview ran the benchmarks on an Intel test rig with a Core i7-12700K, Asus TUF B660M motherboard, RTX 3060 12GB Strix, 16GB DDR4 memory and an 850W PSU running Windows 10 21H2.
The most potential example of real-world gaming performance is Unigine Valley, where the RTX 3060 12GB was 2x to 7.6x faster than the MTT S80 in DX9 and DX11 tests at 1080p and 4K resolution. The MTT S60 averaged 26.1 FPS in our 4K DX9 test, while the RTX 3060 spits out a whopping 197.9 FPS. Also note that Unigine Valley was developed and first released in 2009.
3DMark06 — yes, another fairly old application — showed similar results, with the RTX 3060 being on average 2.5x faster than the MTT S80 at 1080p and 4K resolution.
MTT S80 was able to come out on top in several comprehensive tests, including PCIe bandwidth and pure fill rate. This makes sense with the PCIe link, as the S80’s PCIe 5.0 x16 configuration should significantly exceed the RTX 3060’s PCIe 4.0 x16 spec. In our OCL bandwidth test, the S80 had an average read speed of 28.7GB/s and a write speed of 42.8GB/s. The RTGX 3060 managed 18.3GB/s and 14.2GB/s respectively. In the 3DMark06 texturing test, the MTT S80 achieved 134.8 GTexels per second in the single texturing fill rate test and 168.5 GTexels in the multi texturing test. The RTX 3060 slowed down significantly at 59.9 GTexels/s in the single texturing test, but returned to 177.3 GTexels/s in the multi texturing test.
In addition to these compositing and graphics tests, EXPreview ran several real world games: League of Legends, Cross Fire, QQ Speed, QQ Dance, Fantasy Westward Journey, The Great Heroes, Audition, Running Kart, Diablo III, Ultimate Street Fighter IV, Siege, My World, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit III. Forgive me if I am not aware of some of them, because we are not aware of them either. There are also Chinese versions of popular games such as Counter-Strike and Final Fantasy.
Of course, performance in isolation doesn’t tell us much. 149 fps at 1080p and 128 fps at 4K on maximum settings in League of Legends? How was the RTX 3060’s performance? Other performance results are equally bad, such as hitting the 40 FPS framerate limit on QQ Speed, and it’s a fairly simple looking game.
However, the review mentions driver issues, broken textures, and other issues, and Google Translate concludes, “Compatibility needs to be improved, and the future looks promising.” This should come as no surprise to new GPU companies. Hopefully future ‘reviews’ of the MTT S80 will actually show more realistic comparisons to modern games, rather than old tests that make little sense in today’s market.
