Intel’s dramatic re-entrance to the discrete GPU market could have a significant impact on the current Nvidia - AMD duopoly, but there are other players lurking in the shadows, eagerly awaiting to strike when least expected. Take for instance the Moore Threads company from China that was founded in 2020 and only revealed itself publicly in late 2021. While previous Chinese attempts to provide gaming GPUs that match Nvidia’s models have not yet seen much success, not even on the domestic side, Moore Threads seems to have what it takes to emerge as a worthy competitor on the global discrete GPU market. First off, the company’s CEO is Zhang Jianzhong - a former Nvidia global vice president and general manager with 15 years of experience and support from partners like Lenovo and Tencent. Then we also recently got the announcement of the MTT S60 and MTT S2000 dGPU models that look quite promising.
These two new GPU models Moore Threads just announced are based on TSMC’s 12 nm transistors, so not really cutting edge. However, unlike other Chinese solutions, the MTT lineup shows strong support on the driver side and offers DirectX compatibility, plus AI features, excellent video coding / decoding, and even support for established 3D rendering programs.
Moore Threads recommends the MTT S60 for gaming, but the specs are quite modest, integrating 2048 cores based on the proprietary MUSA architecture plus 8 GB of LPGDDR4X, which theoretically allow for 6 TFLOPS. Performance-wise, this would at most match an Nvidia GTX 1070 launched 6 years ago. The MTT S2000 doubles the cores and TFLOPS and also offers 32 GB of VRAM, but this model is recommended for compute workloads.
League of Legends running in 1080p was chosen to demo the MTT S60 gaming capabilities, which is hardly a reliable benchmark, yet the driver support is where things start to get interesting. Some DX12 supported features include global illumination, advanced anti-aliasing methods, soft shadows, physical rendering, reflections, volumetric light etc. The GPU also supports OpenCL, SYCL, Vulkan, OpenGL / GLES and even Nvidia CUDA, plus it works with x86 as well as ARM-absed CPUs.
A strong plus for the Moore Threads cards is the inclusion of excellent video coding / decoding capabilities. There is hardware support for 8K H.264, H.265, AV1 encoding, as well as H.264, H.265, AV1 , VP8, VP9 decoding. Additionally, the Alpha-Core physical engine can accelerate certain animation and rendering tools from popular suites like Unity, Houdini and Unreal. Compute and AI workloads will be better handled by the MTT S2000 model, which should support neural frameworks for processing visual, audio and natural language content, metaverse and digital avatars etc.
No availability or pricing info as of yet. Moore Threads is expected to ship the first test boards in just a few months.