China's 'little Nvidia' Moore Threads finds edge in video gaming GPUs despite performance gap

A Beijing-based graphics processing unit (GPUs) design firm founded by a former Nvidia executive is generating excitement among Chinese video gamers in a sign of the country's ability to quickly find substitutes for foreign brands in consumer-grade technology.

Moore Threads Technology, which was added to a US trade blacklist at the end of 2023, has emerged as a key competitor in a semiconductor market segment that globally is dominated by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

After the company recently expanded the number of supported titles for its MTT S80 to 130, up from 13 when the GPU launched in late 2022, players online have been favourably comparing it with Nvidia hardware, with many people touting its ability to measure up to GeForce RTX 3060 despite real-world use showing a large performance gap.

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"It is on par with Nvidia's products like the GTX 3060 in common situations, but there's still a gap when playing AAA games," said Eliot Yang Bingshi, a 23-year-old computer gamer in southwestern Sichuan province.

Jams Zhang Jianzhong, CEO of Moore Threads Technology, speaks at the launch of KUAE, a GPU-based computing platform for artificial intelligence training system, on December 19, 2023. Photo: Moore Threads Technology alt=Jams Zhang Jianzhong, CEO of Moore Threads Technology, speaks at the launch of KUAE, a GPU-based computing platform for artificial intelligence training system, on December 19, 2023. Photo: Moore Threads Technology>

That gap could be worth it for people who play older popular games like League of Legends and World of Warcraft, which the card now officially supports, as it comes with a steep discount. The MTT S80's 1,499 yuan (US$200) price tag on e-commerce site JD.com is about 40 per cent below the price of the 4-year-old RTX 3060.

That makes the S80 a great alternative, Yang said.

Online benchmarks show the S80's performance significantly lags the performance of Nvidia cards released eight years ago. Benchmark results posted by PC Watch to X, formerly Twitter, last year showed the S80 being bested by the GTX 1050 Ti, released in 2016, by a significant margin in most tests.

It fares better against the 1050 Ti in results posted to UserBenchmark.com, where only five people have so far submitted S80 results, but Chinese chip far behind the 3060 with a global ranking of 164 compared with 64, respectively.

Moore Threads announced the expansion of supported video game titles at the end of May, when it posted an S80 promotional video to Bilibili, a streaming platform that caters to Chinese gamers and other niche communities.

The company, which has not provided any sales figures for the GPU released 19 months ago, thanked Chinese gamers for supporting the country's "only hope in the graphics card industry".

Nvidia, the world's third most valuable company at about US$3 trillion, has gradually been losing the China market, where it is unable to sell its most advanced GPUs, particularly those used for artificial intelligence (AI), because of US export restrictions.

This has left the field open for domestic players like Huawei, whose own AI chips have been eating up market share.

The gaming GPU market has become less important for Nvidia given the skyrocketing demand for its advanced AI chips. The global gaming GPU market is expected to reach US$15.7 billion by 2029, up from US$3.7 billion this year, according to Mordor Intelligence, a data provider.

While the video gaming market is smaller than AI, general-purpose GPUs can be used for training and running less demanding AI models.

Moore Threads, founded by Jams Zhang Jianzhong in 2020, hopes to become a "little Nvidia" with breakthroughs in GPU development within China. Zhang previously worked at Nvidia as the global vice-president and general manager of China before leaving to start Moore Threads.

The start-up announced last week that it has deployed its KUAE AI computing system with more than 1,000 GPU cards. The system will be used to run Yuren, a large language model of seven billion parameters based on development from Baichuan, one of China's four "AI Tigers".

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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