China's Moore Threads challenges NVIDIA in gaming GPU market
Moore Threads Technology, a Beijing-based company founded by a former NVIDIA executive, is making waves in the Chinese gaming community. Despite being blacklisted by the US in late 2023, the company has become a significant player in the semiconductor market, traditionally dominated by NVIDIA and AMD. The firm's MTT S80 GPU, which now supports 130 games, is being compared favorably to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 by online gamers.
Moore Threads's market positioning
Eliot Yang Bingshi, a 23-year-old gamer from Sichuan province, stated that the MTT S80 is comparable to NVIDIA's GTX 3060 in everyday scenarios, but lags behind in AAA games. Despite this performance gap, the S80 officially supports older popular titles like League of Legends and World of Warcraft. The GPU is priced at CNY 1,499 (about ₹17,250) on JD.com, making it an attractive option for budget-conscious gamers.
GPU performance compared to NVIDIA
Online benchmarks indicate that the performance of Moore Threads's S80 lags significantly behind NVIDIA cards released eight years ago. Benchmark results posted by PC Watch to X in 2023, showed the S80 being outperformed by the GTX 1050 Ti, which was released in 2016. The S80 also falls short when compared to the RTX 3060, ranking 164 globally compared to 64 for the NVIDIA card.
Expansion and future plans
In May, Moore Threads announced an expansion of supported video game titles, and released a promotional video for the S80 on Bilibili, a Chinese streaming platform. The company, founded by Jams Zhang Jianzhong back in 2020, aims to become a "little NVIDIA" with its GPU development breakthroughs within China. Last week, it announced its KUAE AI computing system with over 1,000 GPU cards for running Yuren. It is a large language model of seven billion parameters.
