Chinese GPU maker Moore Threads just held its MUSA Developer Conference, where it unveiled "Huagang," its next-gen architecture set to debut next year. Huagang will span gaming and AI, with significant performance gains promised for both. The event was light on details, so we don't actually have any specs; just claims of what to expect, and we have a lot to look forward to if these promises are true, such as a 15x uplift in "AAA" gaming and a whopping 50x boost in ray tracing performance.
Let's start with "Lushan," the new gaming GPU powered by Huagang that will succeed the existing MTT S80 and S90 models. The latter is the best GPU Moore Threads has offered for a while, and it barely outperforms the RTX 4060, so a rehaul was long overdue. With Lushan, Moore Threads is claiming a 15x uplift in "AAA" gaming — whatever that means (raster?) — and a whopping 50x boost in ray tracing performance.
Moreover, the company is quoting a 64x increase in AI compute, 16x in texture geometry processing, 4x in texture fill, 8x in atomic access, and 4x in memory capacity. For context, the S80 and S90 carry 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, so next year's Lushan GPUs are expected to feature up to 64 GB of memory, which would be interesting to see in these times.
Another vital improvement to Moore Threads' new GPUs is full support for modern APIs such as DirectX 12 Ultimate, which should alleviate compatibility concerns. There is a dedicated 2nd-gen hardware ray tracing engine, along with a new AI hardware block for the "UniTE" unified rendering architecture, which should bring the GPU's rendering pipeline to parity with offerings from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.
Alongside Lushan, Moore Threads also teased the "Huashan" AI GPU, which consists of two chiplets and 8 HBM modules. The performance is being touted as comparable to Nvidia's Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, with memory bandwidth exceeding even the B200. The company also claims a 50% increase in compute density and a 10x improvement in efficiency.
Huashan supports FP4 through FP64 compute and offers exclusive low-precision mixed formats: MTFP4, MTFP6, and MTFP8. In terms of connectivity, Moore Threads plans to scale these GPUs across AI factories, with over 100,000 GPUs interconnected at up to 1314 GB/s via the MTLink 4.0 interconnect.
While we didn't see any gaming or AI benchmarks for these next-gen GPUs, Moore Threads demonstrated DeepSeek V3 performance on the MTT S5000 GPU, achieving 1000 tokens per second in Decode and 4000 tokens per second in Prefill. These results put it slightly ahead of Nvidia's Hopper lineup, which has historically been the cap for Green Team in China in terms of AI GPUs.
The MTT S5000 will launch next year, but it's not part of the Huashan lineup, as it's been in the news before. We should learn more about MT's Huagang GPUs in the coming months as the company takes industry giants like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD head-on with a state-backed Chinese alternative that should help fuel the region's self-reliance ambitions.
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