We’ve been watching information about Glenfly Arise graphics cards in China appear for at least the last year. Well, the self-proclaimed graphics card enthusiast and collector on Twitter has managed to get a sample of his Glenfly Arise 1020 from China. Testing is ongoing. Twitter of Lechzwerk The feed has brought us some new benchmark results. But the West’s first card (maybe?) definitely has some issues.
Starting with the good news, there are enthusiasts outside of China who are testing one of these graphics cards in apps, games and benchmarks that we are all familiar with. This makes it easier to compare to his existing Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs.
A new toy has arrived from China. Glenfly Arise 1020 graphics card🤓🤘 2GB DDR4 (64-bit interface) isn’t high performance, but it’s fun anyway. The PCB date is Week 45, 2022. #glenfly #arise #graphicscard #arise1020 pic.twitter.com/fphHKbvLC9June 13, 2023
Lechtswerg shared some well-shot photos of the simple-looking Glenfrey Arise 1020 today. The PCB is sparsely populated and looks like it would fit on a low profile bracket. The cooler appears to be a simple model designed for 50W and below. He has only two connectors. The old VGA monitor connector and the new HDMI output.
In other words, it’s pretty much the same card we reported about this time last year, with an image shared by a China-based Bilibili user. That card looked very similar to the reference model pictured above.
In early testing of the Glenfly Arise 1020, Löschzwerg seemed disappointed when just launching the GPU-Z tool caused a system freeze. This is not a good start, but strange things can happen when GPU-Z performs low-level hardware accesses and tries to fetch data from an unknown GPU. The Project PhysX benchmark also dropped spectacularly when he used the Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Company graphics card.
I had even better luck, especially with the old 3DMark graphics benchmark tool. 3D mark 11. Löschzwerg commented that successfully running this benchmark demonstrated the Glenfly Arise 1020 to outperform the Moore Threads MTT S80.
Glenfly Arise 1020 – 3DMark11 resultsEntry -> E1980Performance -> P1081Extreme -> X275The Arise 1020 has no resistance run the benchmark, according to the MTT S80, but not as of now.#glenfly #arise #arise1020 #3dmark11 pic.twitter.com/ vFEmarJGJ8June 13, 2023
In 3DMark 11, Chinese graphics cards believed to use mid-2000s S3/Via GPU technology scored Entry – E1980, Performance – P1081, and Extreme X275. In the history of AMD / ATI / Nvidia graphics cards, what is the benchmark for comparison?
Looking back at Tom’s Hardware’s roundup of single-slot graphics cards from June 2011, all the models lightly outperformed this Chinese GPU. We’re talking about graphics cards like AMD Radeon HD 6850, Nvidia GeForce GTS 450, Nvidia GeForce GT 440. It is a pity. To add to the punch, older GPUs like the Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680 are about 10x faster than the Glenfly Arise 1020 using the 3DMark 11 Extreme score as a comparison metric.
Looking back at some tests provided by Bilibili, we found evidence that the Glenfly Arise 1020 is about 60x slower than the relatively new GeForce GTX 1060 (Geekbench OpenCL). It may not be that bad, but it certainly won’t keep up with the best graphics cards.
Noting the above poor performance in last year’s test and today’s test by Löschzwerg, we hope that driver and OS tweaks will improve new Chinese graphics cards over time. We know that 4 of his CUs (256 shaders) combined with 2GB VRAM on a 64bit bus is pretty limiting, but these benchmark results were worse than expected.
Last time we talked about whether providing working or better quality Windows drivers, or testing Chinese hardware on Chinese OSes such as Tongxin/Galaxy Kirin operating systems, makes a difference. I thought. However, we don’t expect to see any major changes in the coming months, especially considering the underlying hardware specs.
These early results remain interesting and we hope that Löschzwerg, together with Chinese tech enthusiasts, make some good progress in their attempt to demonstrate the full potential of Glenfly Arise 1020. TL;DR: Making GPUs is hard.
