China-based Moore Treads started selling its latest MTT S80 graphics card based on the Chunxiao architecture for client PCs on Friday. The add-in board promises computational performance comparable to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, but its actual gaming performance remains unknown. On the other hand, it’s available at JD.com, a store that delivers worldwide.
Chinese GeForce RTX 3060 Ti-like GPU
Moore Threads’ MTT S80 graphics board is based on the company’s Chunxiao graphics processor with 4,096 stream processors, 128 tensor cores, 256 texture units, and 256 rendering outputs running at 1.80 GHz. Additionally, the card features 16 GB of his GDDR6 memory with a data transfer rate of 14 GT/s connected to the GPU using a 256-bit interface (up to 448 GB/s peak bandwidth). I’m here.
In terms of computing performance, MTT S80 offers up to 14.4 FP32 TFLOPS. This is just below the peak compute performance of one of the best graphics cards, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (16.2 FP32 TFLOPS). On the one hand, we have to test the real performance of his MTT S80 AIB in real games.
GPUs come with drivers that support Microsoft’s DirectX application programming interface, Khronos Group’s OpenGL/OpenGL ES, proprietary MUSA, and multiple proprietary APIs. However, Moore Threads professes that DirectX support is still in its infancy, with only 20 popular titles initially supported (for example, call of duty, Cross-fire, counter strike, diablo 3, league of legendsetc.), don’t expect too much from this card for now. Meanwhile, the company says it works closely with Unity and Unreal Engine developers, as well as the designers of the actual games, to ensure compatibility and performance with the two popular engines.
The Chunxiao graphics chip also has a powerful video engine that can handle AV1, H.264 and H.265 codecs up to 8K video. Unfortunately, Moore Threads has not revealed any players that support hardware-assisted video decoding. On the other hand, the MTT S80 AIB has 3 DisplayPort 1.4 and 1 HDMI 2.1 interfaces.
Interestingly, Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPU supports the PCIe Gen4 bus, making the MTT S80 the world’s first client graphics card with a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface. AMD has yet to disclose the host interface for their latest RDNA 3 GPUs in general, and the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon 7900 XTX in particular.
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Only available in bundles
Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card now available on JD.com (opens in new tab) (via video cards) for ¥2999 ($373 before tax). However, the AIB isn’t standalone, it’s bundled with the 1029 Yen Asus TUF Gaming B660M-PLUS D4 motherboard. After deducting the price of the motherboard, the graphics board costs $245 excluding his VAT. This is relatively cheap given the computing power. Still, it’s unclear how well this product will perform, so we can’t help but wonder if it’s really worth $245.
Another thing to point out is that according to VideoCardz, the initial release of the MTT S80 was very limited, and it’s unclear how many were actually made. It is also unknown when the second batch is set to come and how big it will be.
New kid on the block?
There are about ten well-known graphics processor developers in China. Some target only the data center (including AI and HPC), while others target only the local market while designing client GPUs. Founded in October 2020, Moore Threads designs GPUs for many applications (excluding HPC) and apparently intends to sell its products outside of China. This is why the company makes his MTT S80 available on his JD.com. JD.com ships worldwide and works with popular engine and game developers to ensure compatibility with Western titles.
Will it succeed? This will depend on multiple factors, including engineering talent availability, willingness to invest, and ability to execute. Moore Threads is a very young company, so far they have released 4 AIBs (MTT S10, MTT S50, MTT S60 and MTT S2000) and 2 (MTT S80 and MTT S3000), but enough I just wonder if there are any such numbers. People who deal with all declared market opportunities. After all, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia employ thousands of people to work on gaming and data center GPUs.
In addition, it remains to be seen whether Western companies will work closely with Chinese companies in areas such as video games. Given the U.S. government’s stringent restrictions on China’s semiconductor and supercomputing sectors, some companies may consider working with China-based tech companies risky. There is a nature. In fact, there are things they might consider potentially toxic.
Chunxiao GPUs in the form of MTT S80 are targeted at consumer applications and are not designed for artificial intelligence or high performance computing applications. Moore Threads also has the MTT S3000 32GB server-grade board that delivers 15.2 FP32 TFLOPS of throughput and supports datacenter-oriented features like up to 32-way GPU partitioning and his SR-IOV PCIe virtualization. . Chunxiao graphics processors, on the other hand, support FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision. So, assuming it also supports the right instruction set, it can theoretically be used for AI and even some light HPC workloads that don’t need FP64.
Based on what we know about Chunxiao graphics processors, we believe they are primarily intended for gaming and entertainment applications. Data Center MTT S3000 may be mainly used for remote Android game rendering, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and video streaming services.
It is unclear whether the MTT S3000 can actually be effectively used for non-consumer AI and data center technical computing applications. Given the form factor, power consumption, and performance, it’s a reasonable question. There is a possibility.
