Moore Threads has released version 290.100 of its MTT S Series Windows desktop driver; today's freshly published patch notes describe "performance and experience optimizations" for multiple modern games titles. Press coverage of the Chinese graphics card manufacturer's hardware portfolio has concentrated mostly on deficiencies, relative to Western offerings. Despite being the first desktop gaming graphics card to arrive with a PCI Express Gen 5 bus interface, Moore Threads' MTT S80 model has consistently struggled to keep up with mainstream competition. Most notably, their current 200 W TDP-rated flagship—packing 4096 "MUSA" cores—trailed behind AMD Radeon iGPUs, according to March 2024 benchmarks.

The latest Moore Threads driver improvements were tested out internally, prior to public release. Patch notes claim that Infinity Nikki (DirectX 12-only) average frame rates "increased by more than 40%." Another DX12 title was benched—Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding: "average frame rate has increased by more than 50%." The largest upgrade was observed when playing A Plague Tale: Requiem; the MTT engineering team claims that average in-game frame rates climbed by more than 120%. We hope that independent outlets will publish results based on their own testing methodologies, in the near future. Going back to September 2023, Moore Threads boasted about driver update 230.40.0.1 producing a 40% gaming performance uplift for MTT S80 and S70 cards. Outside the gaming sphere, Moore Threads has hinted about its MTT S80 GPU being a high achiever with DeepSeek's R1-Distill-Qwen-7B distilled model.

Moore Threads, a Chinese manufacturer of proprietary GPU designs is (reportedly) the latest company to jump onto the DeepSeek-R1 bandwagon. Since late January, NVIDIA, Microsoft and AMD have swooped in with their own interpretations/deployments. By global standards, Moore Threads GPUs trail behind Western-developed offerings—early 2024 evaluations presented the firm's MTT S80 dedicated desktop graphics card struggling against an AMD integrated solution: Radeon 760M. The recent emergence of DeepSeek's open source models has signalled a shift away from reliance on extremely powerful and expensive AI-crunching hardware (often accessed via the cloud)—widespread excitement has been generated by DeepSeek solutions being relatively frugal, in terms of processing requirements. Tom's Hardware has observed cases of open source AI models running (locally) on: "inexpensive hardware, like the Raspberry Pi."

According to recent Chinese press coverage, Moore Threads has announced a successful deployment of DeepSeek's R1-Distill-Qwen-7B distilled model on the aforementioned MTT S80 GPU. The company also revealed that it had taken similar steps with its MTT S4000 datacenter-oriented graphics hardware. On the subject of adaptation, a Moore Threads spokesperson stated: "based on the Ollama open source framework, Moore Threads completed the deployment of the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B distillation model and demonstrated excellent performance in a variety of Chinese tasks, verifying the versatility and CUDA compatibility of Moore Threads' self-developed full-featured GPU." Exact performance figures, benchmark results and technical details were not disclosed to the Chinese public, so Moore Threads appears to be teasing the prowess of its MTT GPU designs. ITHome reported that: "users can also perform inference deployment of the DeepSeek-R1 distillation model based on MTT S80 and MTT S4000. Some users have previously completed the practice manually on MTT S80." Moore Threads believes that its: "self-developed high-performance inference engine, combined with software and hardware co-optimization technology, significantly improves the model's computing efficiency and resource utilization through customized operator acceleration and memory management. This engine not only supports the efficient operation of the DeepSeek distillation model, but also provides technical support for the deployment of more large-scale models in the future."

Chinese GPU maker Moore Threads has prepared a professional graphics card called MTT X300, aimed at professional visualization workloads like CAD, BIM, GIS, and video editing. The Moore Threads X300 GPU utilizes second-generation MUSA architecture, featuring 4096 MUSA cores that deliver 14.4 TFLOPS of FP32 computing power. It comes equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, achieving a memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. The X300 takes advantage of PCIe Gen 5 x16 connectivity and offers versatile display options through three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1 port, supporting resolutions up to 7680 x 4320. All of that comes on a 255 W TGP package.

While the X300 GPU may be a new SKU, it resembles Moore Threads MTT S80 gaming GPU with a different firmware and set of drivers. The new X300 features hardware accelerated decoding for AV1, H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9, AVS, AVS2, MPEG4, and MPEG2, while also providing hardware encoding capabilities for AV1, H.264, and H.265. Given the professional application, the X300 can simultaneously handle up to 36 channels of 1080p@30 FPS video for both encoding and decoding operations while supporting 4-way display output up to 8K resolution. Interestingly, Moore Threads developed drivers for all mainstream CPU architectures such as x86, Arm, and even LoongArch.

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