The Moore Threads MTT S80 first attracted wider media attention last summer due to it being introduced as the world's first PCIe Gen 5 gaming graphics card. Unfortunately, its performance prowess in gaming benchmarks did not match early expectations, especially for a 200 W TDP-rated unit with 4096 "MUSA" cores. Evaluators discovered that driver issues have limited the full potential of MTT GPUs—it is speculated that Moore Threads has simply repurposed existing PowerVR architecture under their in-house design: "Chunxaio." The Chinese firm has concentrated on driver improvements in the interim—mid-February experimentations indicated 100% performance boosts for MTT S80 and S70 discrete GPUs courtesy of driver version 240.90. Germany's ComputerBase managed to import Moore Threads MTT S80 and S30 models for testing purposes—in an effort to corroborate recently published performance figures, as disclosed by Asian review outlets.

The Moore Thread MTT S80—discounted down to $164 last October—was likely designed with MMO gamers in mind. VideoCardz (based on ComputerBase findings) discussed the card's struggles when weighed against Team Red's modern day integrated solutions: "S80 falls short when compared to the Ryzen 5 8600G, featuring the Radeon 760M iGPU with RDNA 3 graphics. A geometric mean across various titles reveals the S80's lag, but there are exceptions, like DOTA 2, where it takes the lead in framerate. It's clear that MTT GPUs (have a) less emphasized focus on supporting AAA titles." ComputerBase confirmed that DirectX 12 API support is still lacking, meaning that many popular Western games titles remain untested on the Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card. The freshly launched entry-level MTT S30 card produced "1/4 of the performance" when compared to its flagship sibling.

More details are emerging of the elusive Moore Threads MTT S30 entry-level graphics card, which was released earlier this week. VideoCardz reports that the GPU features hardware-accelerated decoding of AV1, besides H.265 and H.264, which should cover all the bases for its use as a streaming content consumption GPU. The card features an HDMI 2.0 port that supports 4K Ultra HD up to 60 Hz. The D-Sub connector tops out at 1920 x 1200. Most Windows-based media applications use Direct3D or DXVA codepaths for accelerated video decode, and so the GPU has some form of DirectX API support, although we still don't know up to which version that is. It also supports OpenGL, which should come in handy with certain Adobe applications that use GL contexts to draw their workspaces. The source also reports a rather attractive retail price of just RMB ¥399, or about USD $55.

Moore Threads, the Chinese company aiming to build a contemporary PC GPU family indigenous to China, formally introduced the MTT S30, an entry-level GPU. Given the performance positioning of the company's flagship MTT S80 GPU even with its recent performance doubling driver update, one can conclude that the MTT S30 isn't quite a gaming GPU. It has a quarter of the unified shaders of the MTT S80, 1/6th its FP32 throughput, and a quarter of its memory size; which means the GPU really is an iGPU replacement that accelerates one or more high-resolution displays for non-gaming productivity workloads, and perhaps some media acceleration.

The Moore Threads MTT S30 features 1,024 unified shaders, an unknown number of tensor accelerators, a 1.30 GHz GPU clock, and 4 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus. The reference design card is single-slot, half-height, and draws all its power from the PCIe slot, given that its power draw is rated at just 40 W. This card has just two display connectors—HDMI and D-Sub. It features a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface.