Next-gen Chinese GPU touts RTX 2080-level performance — Loongson claims 9A2000 is up to 10x faster than the 9A1000
With enough power to run Black Myth: Wukong, says senior exec.
Chinese chipmaker Loongson has a new GPU on the way that blows its current-gen 9A1000 out of the water. According to a senior company executive speaking today, the upcoming Loongson 9A2000 will deliver performance that is “8-10 times that of 9A1000,” reports Chinese language tech site ITHome.
The machine translation suggests that the new 9A2000 is comparable to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080. Nvidia’s Turing architecture RTX 2080 is still a very serviceable graphics card in 2024, as evidenced by our frequently updated GPU benchmarks rankings.
The headlining information comes from Loongson Chairman and General Manager Hu Weiwu, who spoke during a Q&A session at the firm’s 2024 semi-annual results briefing. Hu answered a question about the status of the current generation 9A1000 and positioning plans for the 9A2000.
The answer from the top Loongson exec revealed that the 9A1000 and 9A2000 GPUs will co-exist as they address pretty different markets. Specifically, the 9A1000 GPU will be taped out by year-end and address entry-level users with what is expected to be Radeon RX 550-level performance. The 9A1000 card will be suitable for budget systems, with minimal 3D rendering demands, and where 32 TOPS of AI inference is sufficient.
However, we were much more interested in hearing some of the first details regarding the Loongson 9A2000 GPU. Hu stated that the new 9A2000 GPU’s performance will be “8-10 times that of 9A1000.” Moreover, for those of us needing a more familiar frame of reference, he told briefing listeners that “it is comparable to Nvidia RTX 2080.”
PC enthusiasts outside of China might not flock to a Loongson GPU that can match the 2018 vintage RTX 2080 and currently lacks DX12 support (DX12 compatibility is just a ‘maybe’). However, if the price is right and the performance lives up to the tease today, some may consider buying a 9A2000 for testing, tinkering, or even out of sheer curiosity.
The Loongson 9A2000 GPU and Black Myth: Wukong gaming
An RTX 2080 is still higher than most PC games’ minimum to recommended spec levels in 2024, but will you be able to enjoy titles like Black Myth: Wukong?
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Thankfully, Hu answered this question during the Q&A. The exec explained, “In terms of GPGPU performance, the display performance of 9A2000 should be able to support it.” We guess that’s one way of saying no and hinting that the platform/drivers won’t allow gamers to have any anthropomorphic monkey fun unless there are some key software and driver developments. However, we note that DX11 is indeed enough to run this title.
We published a deep dive on Black Myth: Wukong PC gaming last month. Referencing our GPU hierarchy data, an RTX 2080 user could likely enjoy about 90 to 100 FPS in the game at 1080p medium settings (no RT). Officially, the recommended hardware levels call for an RTX 2060 or better GPU, but we aren’t sure what quality settings and frame rate that target.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
-
jlake3 Is this actually intended for the consumer market as a gaming product? The framing of the article makes it sound like it is, but the lack of DX12 support and the weird phrasing of "In terms of GPGPU performance" in the quote makes it sound like it's a server/workstation compute accelerator that also happens to have some basic graphics functionality. Which reminds me of the Moore Threads cards, that last I heard were HORRIBLY under-performing what would be expected based on their FP32 FLOPS/memory bandwidth/TDP/etc., if the games ran at all.Reply
Nothing against them if they're not aiming for the consumer market, but it seems like coverage of Loongson and Moore Threads struggles to determine where their products actually fit into the landscape. -
YSCCC Somehow I have a feeling that after release it is found to be really 100% 2080, and can install NVIDIA driver and identified as such…Reply -
YSCCC Reply
Usually in China, when somethine is claiming same performance as chip X, usually it IS chip X itself, just sanded off the mark and encrave their mark on itpocketdrummer said:Place your bets on how much is that tech was stolen. -
Geef Both previous posts were somewhat correct, but one other thing. China ALWAYS says they can do XYZ or they are as fast as PDQ.Reply
We just have to wait for the actual gear to show up and benchmark it. 🤔 -
Amdlova I doubt they can copy a today chip. And people work with this kind of tech as tons of money... they build fabs or something like that. They don't risk get caught and loose everything...Reply -
erazog Loongson hardware cannot be sold outside of China without an export license so this isn't going to be legally available in the west any time soon.Reply
Also Loongson hardware is designed for it's domestic linux distro LoongOS, maybe Deepin too which has a Loongarch build. LoongOS does have an x86 linux binary translation layer but its not a gaming OS, really more research and development focused. Deepin is more of the you want something like windows.
Longsoon have contributed open source drivers to the linux kernel for their CPU's but graphics hardware is an unknown, hopefully they would be smart enough to open source their GPU driver and build it into Mesa3D like AMD/Intel do but it could be closed source which would restrict it's use with certain linux kernels.
I would be very surprised to see if this got windows drivers, that would undermine their whole effort get away from Windows a US owned IP in China.
Time will tell if it can meet their claims of RTX-2080 levels of rasterization performance. -
The Historical Fidelity If it’s not capable of handling directx12, then comparing it to a directx12 card is not really applicable. We all know that the 2000 series are essentially 1000 series raster with added tensor and ray tracing cores which is why the 2000 series was such a disappointment.Reply -
defunctup Reply
ah yes because US companies like Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Apple have never stolen tech /s.pocketdrummer said:Place your bets on how much is that tech was stolen.