China’s Moore Treads MTT S80 graphics card Tested in a series of games by TechTuber BullsLab JayAccording to them, these GPUs only come up for sale in small batches from time to time, so we were lucky to get our hands on one.
Simply put, the 12nm, 4096 core GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 and 250W TGP was a disappointment in gaming as it consistently beat the GT 1030 2GB with 30W TGP. It seemed limited to DX9 games at the time of review (advertised as DX11 capable), and its AV1 codec acceleration was also lacking. Last but not least, BullsLab Jay’s research reveals his mysterious Chunxaio GPU with MUSA cores, as the MTT S80 relies on his PowerVR-based GPU architecture .
in the Videos by BullsLab Jay, you can see Moore Threads graphics cards unboxed, tested and disassembled. If you open the link, you can watch it with English closed captions, but I embedded a benchmark-only video from TechTuber’s ENG channel below. So you can see some of the benchmarking action without messing with the caption controls.
The 250W MTT S80 has a bulky triple fan cooler, but if you remove it, you’ll find that the PCB is only two fans long. Compare this design to the 30W GT 1030 which can run with a passive heatsink. The other card used in the test, the 120W GTX 1060, offered stratospheric gaming performance compared to the MTT S80, although it’s also usually produced in single or two-fan versions.
Once the benchmarks were reached, the titles during comparative testing were limited to DX9 games. Here are all the games that worked with the Moore Threads review card/driver. The architecture he claims to support DX11 seems to require some driver updates. In the video summary charts, the MTT S80 is often half as fast as the aging low-power GT 1030. Only 1 or 2 outliers indicate that the MTT S80 has some potential.
Speaking of unrealized possibilities, even the advertised claims of AV1 video codec support now ring in vain. While some tests showed AV1 decoding to be handled by the CPU, YouTube’s tests showed the card pushing video processing for the VP9 codec onto the GPU.
BullsLab Jay dug into an old Moore Threads China presentation and concluded that the MTT S80 uses Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR architecture. Some expected Moore Threads to be less positive about this, pointing in a different direction than his Innosilicon Fantasy (Fenghua) line, which uses PowerVR IP. (Again, I wasn’t very forward in informing people about the underlying architecture).
The Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card is bundled with the Asus TUF B660M motherboard and retails for around $430 in China. After deducting the cost of the board, the graphics card is around $260. Perhaps as the driver matures and these his PowerVR cards for PC become more effective challengers, FP32’s potential will begin to show more.
With the decidedly faster GT 1030 currently selling for under $80, the MTT S80 can’t be said to sell for more than three times that price. As we’ve seen with Intel over the past few months, driver updates can significantly improve performance. Of course, that depends on how much time and effort the company plans to put into improving the driver, as well as architectural limitations.
