China’s fastest home-grown gaming GPU has been thoroughly embarrassed by benchmarks that put it barely ahead of AMD’s nine-year-old Radeon RX 580.
PC Games Hardware tested Lisuan Tech’s LX 7G100 across 20 games and found its performance far from earlier suggestions of GeForce RTX 4060 territory.
In PCGH’s 14-game performance index, the LX 7G100 scored 11.1 points. AMD’s Radeon RX 580, launched in 2017, managed 10.6, leaving Lisuan’s shiny new silicon only about five per cent ahead. The GeForce RTX 2060 scored 17.2 points, making the seven-year-old Nvidia card roughly 55 per cent faster.
AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 reached 20 points, putting it about 80 per cent ahead of the LX 7G100. The current GeForce RTX 5060 scored 33 points, almost three times Lisuan’s result. Even Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, released in 2016, is uncomfortably close. Lisuan beats it by roughly 23 per cent despite arriving a decade later.
On paper, the LX 7G100 looks rather less prehistoric. The card carries 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit interface, delivering 432GB/s of memory bandwidth, while its GPU runs at around 2GHz. Lisuan claims 24.6 TFLOPS of FP32 compute performance from its TrueGPU architecture, manufactured using TSMC’s N6 process.
PCGH found that only 14 of its 20 modern test games made the main benchmark suite. Ray tracing is off the menu because the hardware lacks dedicated support, while Vulkan and other software problems caused further casualties.
The situation is not entirely hopeless. PCGH found the LX 7G100 generally performed considerably better than Moore Threads’ MTT S80, another attempt to produce a competitive Chinese gaming GPU. It can even run Crysis, which should save somebody in the marketing department from having to fall on their sword. In Dota 2 at 1440p, the card could compete with much newer hardware including AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 and Intel’s Arc A580.
Independent testing found the card’s power behaviour particularly ugly at idle, another reminder that building competitive GPU silicon involves rather more than getting respectable theoretical throughput. The benchmark results underline the gap China’s domestic GPU industry still faces as the country attempts to reduce its reliance on AMD, Intel and Nvidia technology.
Lisuan at least has a functioning first-generation gaming product with reasonable Windows driver support. PCGH reckons it sets several records among Chinese graphics cards, even if the competition currently consists mostly of other domestic GPUs trying to escape the previous decade.
For now, the LX 7G100’s biggest problem is that it sits in bargain bins and second-hand PCs. AMD launched the Radeon RX 580 in April 2017, and nine years later, Lisuan has only just managed to crawl past it.
