Chinese company manufactures a graphics card compatible with Vulkan and DirectX, direct competition for AMD and NVIDIA

Everyone looking to buy a GPU has their eyes on AMD, NVIDIA and soon to Intel, and now we heard of a Chinese company looking to enter the market for consumer and server GPUs. Jingjia Micro (also known as Jingjiawei) has been working on two graphics cards: a low-end model that will be as powerful as a GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 560, and a more powerful model that could perform like a GeForce GTX 1080 or RX Vega 64.

Jingjiawei isn’t the only Chinese company trying to develop a GPU. Innosilicon took a similar path by partnering with a company called Xiandong, which already has some experience in manufacturing server GPUs. The two companies made a graphics card they call Fenghua 1 and it can be used as a data center computer accelerator card or as a desktop graphics card.

Interestingly, the Fenghua 1 is based on Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR IP. It also supports the OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenGL ES, OpenCL and DirectX APIs, which is a first for any Chinese GPU. And since it’s aimed at the consumer market as well, it comes with an HDMI 2.1 port, a DisplayPort 1.4, and even a DVI port.

The Chinese Desktop PC card would have similar performance to a GTX 1660 SUPER.

Not much is known about the hardware itself, but the ad says that the card features Micron GDDR6X video memory and that the GPU is based on one of Innosilicon’s Innolink chiplet designs. In addition, the card is compatible with the PCIe 4.0 standard and works in Windows, Linux and Android environments, but the press release does not tell us anything about its performance. The only number we get is the FP32 throughput, which is 6 teraflops. For reference, AMD’s RX 6600 has 7.3 teraflops and Nvidia’s GTX 1660 SUPER can achieve more than 5 teraflops.

Another hint about the potential of the new Fenghua 1 graphics card comes from Imagination Technologies Marketing Director David Harold. In October 2020, it said that the 11th-generation PowerVR architecture has 70 percent more performance per watt compared to existing desktop GPUs.

If true, this claim may speak to the Fenghua 1’s energy efficiency, but we’ll have to wait and see how it performs in real-world tasks compared to existing solutions from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.

The new graphics card is expected to be available to consumers sometime in 2022-2023.

Source: Imaginationtech