The Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card has been subject to a significant price cut in its home country (h/t VideoCardz) in honor of Singles' Day. However, even at the new price of ¥1,199 ($164), it is not likely to fly off the shelves because issues like real-world performance and idle power consumption weigh heavily against it.
On paper the MTT S80 looks pretty attractive: it packs a modern 12nm PowerVR-based GPU with 4096 GPU cores, 16GB of GDDR6, and support for the latest PCIe Gen5 spec. Moore’s Threads claims a peak performance of 14.2 TFLOPS, and the memory is said to deliver 448 GB/s bandwidth.
But the MTT S80 excellent specs are less appealing when we start to look at the software / driver side of things. Support for new PC games and apps is limited, for example. This GPU is advertised as DirectX 11 capable, but it still seems happier with DX 9 titles.
Things look even worse for the Chinese graphics card when put under the beady eyes of testers outside of China. We have reported on both BullsLab Jay testing the MTT S80 (back in Feb.) and, more recently, Japan’s PC Watch checking out the card through an extensive test suite (in June).
When tested, the evidence shows that the MTT S80 is something of a sheep in wolf’s clothing. It has good specs on paper and even looks the part with its beefy triple fan cooling shroud. However, tests show the 255W MTT S80 performs somewhat similarly to an old 30W Nvidia GeForce GT 1030. Meanwhile, a modest GPU such as the GTX 1050 Ti absolutely towers over the MTT S80 — and has much better support in APIs, apps, and games.
People might be attracted by the MTT S80 (and S70) graphics cards at their ‘limited time’ pricing for 11.11 Singles' Day. But if they care to do the teeniest bit of research, Chinese PC enthusiasts will find their hard-earned cash is likely better spent elsewhere — for example, anything from our best graphics cards rankings.
