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.

The Moore Thread's MTT S80 discrete graphics card is now available as part of a special 11-11 (Single's Day) promotion in China, for the equivalent of USD $164, making it both the world's first PCIe Gen 5 gaming graphics card, and the most affordable one to feature 16 GB of memory. Moore Thread's is a Chinese GPU manufacturer that has been aiming to build a contemporary GPU to grab a slice of the entry-mainstream gaming market in China for a few years now.

Much of the PC gaming scene in China doesn't involve AAA productions in need of the fastest GPU out there, but rather GPUs from the mainstream performance tier—Moore Thread's knows this, and has been reinventing many wheels in the absence of the kind of graphics IP cross-licensing entanglement that exists among NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. The company's fastest GPU is the MTT S80 launched in late 2022, which has the bragging rights to be the world's first with a PCI Express Gen 5 bus interface. Does it need this kind of bandwidth? We honestly don't know, after seeing how sensitive to PCIe interface and resizable-BAR even mainstream Intel GPUs can be. At launch the performance level of the MTT S80 made it more of a novelty than anything, with performance barely matching a Radeon RX 6400, making it about as fast as the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen 5000G "Cezanne" desktop APUs. This is just enough for China's homebrew MOBAs and MMORPGs that are designed to maximize market reach, and hence tend to contain a lot of pre-baked content.Image Courtesy: Expreview