China's First Domestic GPU Announced With 1080p League of Legends Demo

Moore Threads was founded in October 2020 and broke cover in late 2021 with the announcement that it would become China's first "fully featured GPU" company. Today the Beijing startup officially announced its first two graphics cards; the MTT S60 for PC desktops and workstations, and the MTT S2000 for servers. Both are based on 12nm GPUs built using the MUSA architecture, and the MTT S60 was demo'd at the event playing League of Legends at 1080p.

We wrote about Moore Threads when it exited stealth mode back in November of last year. Today at the launch event, founder and CEO of Moore Threads, Zhang Jianzhong, made his first public appearance in his current role. ITHome explains that Jianzhong is a former global VP of Nvidia and GM in China, and has been deeply involved in the graphics business for 15 years. He has a strong supporting team with experience across the industry in China and abroad.

Before looking closer at what was launched today, let us chart out the key hardware specs, as far as we know them at this early stage:

If you want a point of reference for the MTT S60's 6 TFLOPs GPU performance claim, the Xbox One X was heralded as having a 6 TFLOPs GPU back in 2017. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 from a year earlier had pretty similar performance by this metric, of approximately 6.5 TFLOPs.

The first gen MUSA architecture has been dubbed 'Sudi'. According to reports from the launch event, this GPU features four major processing engines: graphics, AI, video, and physics.

As part of the launch presentation, there were a wide range of demos shown. For the demo of the graphics rendering engine, Moore Threads showed a game of League of Legends being played on an MTT S60. Not the most demanding game, but gamers will be happy to know that advanced features such as global illumination, spatiotemporal anti-aliasing, physical rendering, soft shadows, reflections, and volumetric light are said to be supported. The title ran at 1080p, but we don't know anything about the graphics quality or average framerate. One must also remember that LOL's official recommended specs are very low – to play fluidly, Riot only recommends an Nvidia GeForce 560 or AMD Radeon HD 6950 or better (updated specs from July 2021). 

Moving onto AI, the MUSA-based graphics cards can support various mainstream AI frameworks, such as those for accelerating visual processing, audio processing, natural language processing and more.

Video processing happens with what is called an intelligent multimedia engine. It is claimed to be capable of 8K codec support and is AV1 codec friendly for cloud conferencing, live broadcast and more.

Last, but not least, the physical engine, dubbed Alphacore, works with tools such as Unity, Houdini, and Unreal to accelerate realistic motion of complex structures and materials.

Demonstrations of multiple MUSA architecture GPU processing technologies working together were made in 3D rendering programs, image recognition, metaverse avatar animations, scientific simulation software and more.

In a Q&A, the CEO of Moore Treads echoed the wisdom that graphics card driver and support software is extremely important to a successful product. From Jianzhong's claims, it sounds like his company has everything covered in this department too. For example, the MUSA architecture is said have support for OpenCL, SYCL, CUDA, Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL / GLES and other mainstream programming interfaces. Additionally, these GPUs will work with systems based on either x86 and Arm processors and all domestic (China) mainstream OSes.

It must also be commented upon that the progress shown by Moore Threads is extraordinary. From its founding in Oct 2020, it became a 'Unicorn' company within 100 days, and as per our report last November had successfully developed a fully featured GPU, with a multitude of modern supporting features and technologies, that has now finally been announced today in two SKUs.

Without pouring cold water on the achievements thus far, it is quite easy to make big claims about performance, capabilities, and compatibility. Moore Threads has had a lot of investment thrown at it and names multiple Chinese PC partners including Lenovo and Tencent, so it's not like it's a scrappy underdog. However, the demos were not extremely illuminating, and the proof of the product is when it is in end-user hands.

With the accelerated growth and development seen so far, it shouldn't take the outfit many more months to ship product to independent testers/the public, and then we can really see what the MTT S60 can achieve.

Graphics card prices have been easing significantly in recent weeks. If you don't want to wait for a Moore Threads MTT S60 to become available, you could instead look over our Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2022 guide.