First Chinese Desktop GPU Announced, League of Legends Live Test

Moore Threads was founded in October 2020 and launched in late 2021 with the announcement that it would become China’s first “PC GPU” manufacturing company. Today, it officially announced its first two graphics cards, the MTT S60 for desktops and workstations and the MTT S2000 for servers. Both are based on 12nm GPUs built on the MUSA architecture, and the MTT S60 was shown at the event running League of Legends at 1080p.

At this launch event, Moore Threads founder and CEO Zhang Jianzhong made his first public appearance as CEO. Jianzhong is a former Global Vice President of Nvidia and GM China and has been deeply involved in the GPU business for 15 years. He has a strong support team with experience throughout the industry in China and abroad.

The company announced two models, one for desktop PCs and one for servers.

To have a reference point the MTT S60 has a performance of 6 TFLOPs, the Xbox One X had a GPU with 6 TFLOPs of performance in 2017. Last year’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 performed fairly similarly by this metric, clocking in at roughly 6.5 TFLOPs.

The first generation of MUSA architecture was nicknamed Sudi. According to reports from the launch event, this GPU has four main processing engines, graphics, AI, video, and physics.

As part of the launch presentation, a wide variety of tests were shown. For the graphics rendering engine demo, Moore Threads showcased League of Legends gameplay on the MTT S60.

It’s not the most demanding game, but gamers will be happy to know that it has advanced features like global illumination, spatiotemporal smoothing, physical rendering, soft shadows, reflections, and volumetric lighting.

The game is running at 1080p, but with no information on graphics quality or frame rate.

Moving on to AI, graphics cards based on the MUSA architecture can support various mainstream AI configurations, such as those that accelerate visual processing, audio processing, natural language processing, etc.

The video processing happens with what is called an intelligent multimedia engine. The company claims that it is capable of supporting the 8K codec and is compatible with the AV1 codec for cloud streaming, live streaming, and other modes.

Last but not least, the physics engine, called Alphacore, works with tools like Unity, Houdini, and Unreal to speed up realistic movement of complex structures and materials.

Various GPU rendering technologies using the MUSA architecture have been demoed in 3D rendering programs, image recognition, metaverse avatar animations, scientific simulation software, and more.

In a question and answer session, the executive director of Moore Treads said that graphics drivers and supporting software are extremely important to having a successful product.so the company is paying attention in this department.

The MUSA architecture supports OpenCL, SYCL, CUDA, Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL/GLES and other programming interfaces. Also, these GPUs will work with systems based on x86 and Arm processors and all mainstream operating systems (most popular in China).

Let’s be realistic and that’s why we have to say that the progress shown by Moore Threads is extraordinary. Since its founding in October 2020, it has become a Unicorn and has successfully developed a functional GPU with a lot of modern features and technologies, which has finally been announced this week, bringing two models.

The new card supports OpenCL, SYCL, CUDA, Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL/GLES

With the rapid growth and development that these types of companies have, it shouldn’t take many months for the product to reach the testers or the public, and then we can really see what the MTT S60 can achieve.

As all these demonstrations were carried out by the company, it is important that the graphics cards reach the public, so that tests are carried out to analyze their true performance. Pricing and availability information has not been published.