Moore Threads MTT S80 GPU Escapes China, Gets Benchmarked

Japanese tech site PC Watch has managed to get its hands on a Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card. This card uses a GPU that, despite some obfuscation deployed by Moore Threads management, appears to use the Imagination Technologies PowerVR architecture. This isn't going to make the list of the best graphics cards, not even if we roll back the clock to 2015, but it's good to start to see cards like this tested outside of China in benchmarks and games we're familiar with.

Though we're pretty sure that the PowerVR architecture is behind the card, PC Watch reported from Moore Threads verbatim regarding the specs of the MTT S80. So, the card uses the Chunxaio architecture, employing 4096 MUSA cores. Other specs include the GPU's clock speed of 1.8 GHz, and its peak performance of 14.2 TFLOPS. There's a generous 16GB of GDDR6 14 Gbps memory onboard the sample tested by PC Watch, and that connects to the GPU via a 256-bit bus for 448 GB/s bandwidth.

The MTT S80 is relatively power hungry, with a TGP (total graphics power) of 255W. That's probably why it includes a triple fan design. Also interesting is that the card uses a PCI Express Gen5 x16 connector. These raw specs don't tell the full story, of course, and driver support could still be a major factor in performance. But let's see what PC Watch found in its testing.

Before we look at the benchmarks and gaming tests, please note that PC Watch found there were lots of current games that wouldn't run on the MTT S80 - even using a supported motherboard, OS and CPU. DX12 and Vulkan games were insurmountable hurdles for this card, but some DX11 titles could run with varying degrees of success. Modern benchmarks faced a similar issue, with the most current version of 3DMark stable and usable being 3DMark 06.

Above you can see that the MTT S80 fares very badly when put up against even modest competition like Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, a budget GPU that debuted in 2016. On paper, the GTX 1050 Ti is woefully outmatched — it offers up 2.1 teraflops of compute, has 4GB of GDDR5 memory, and 112 GB/s of bandwidth with a 75W TGP. Even with such weak competition, the Moore Threads graphics card falls flat.

The MTT S80 fared best in DX9 graphics comparisons. It was still significantly behind the GTX 1050 Ti but not completely trounced. Or... well, it was completely trounced, but the average performance lead in the DX9 tests was 'only' 86% — so not quite double the performance.

Things were much worse for the MTT S80 when PC Watch looked at a selection of DX11 games. Besides some rendering errors, performance was very poor and some games effectively failed to work at all with single digit fps. Even if we discount Asetto Corsa where the Nvidia GPU was 90 times faster, the average lead in the DX11 games was still 188%, nearly triple the performance. One percent lows were also frightful on the MTT S80.

Poor performance and compatibility isn't the end of the sorry tale of the Moore Threads graphics card, unfortunately. As it stands, the card sucks up a lot of watts for very little. The MTT S80 on average consumed 142W, while the GTX 1050 Ti averaged just 60W.

In terms of performance per watt, even discounting Asetto Corsa (again), the MTT S80 managed just 0.33 fps/W while the GTX 1050 Ti averaged 1.86 fps/W. That makes the old Pascal GPU over five times as efficient.

There's a clear disconnect between the raw specs of the MTT S80 and its real-world results. On paper, the MTT S80 has four times as much memory, four times the memory bandwidth, and nearly seven times the raw FP32 compute. It's nowhere near reaching that theoretical level of performance.

PC Watch seems to think that the Moore Threads graphics card's major issue is with drivers, so it has some hope that things will continue to improve over the coming months. For now, the MTT S80 is not for gamers, curious developers, or graphics card collectors.

Back in February we reported on Korean TechTuber BullsLab Jay's video featuring the same MTT S80 graphics card. At that time, gaming tests were restricted to DX9 titles due to platform / driver immaturity. The fact that the MTT S80 can now at least try to run some DX11 games shows progress with the drivers, but there's still a long way to go. DirectX 12 and Vulkan games are also not currently supported.