MTT S80: The Chinese RTX 3060 TI for only $245, which seems too good to be true.
Moore Treads, a Chinese company, opened its pre-orders on Friday for its Chunxiao-based MTT S80 graphics cards. The computing capability of the add-in-board is claimed to be comparable to that of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, but its performance in actual games is still unknown. In the interim, JD.com, a shop that ships internationally, has it in stock.
The Chunxiao graphics processor from Moore Threads with its 4,096 stream processors, 128 tensor cores, 256 texture units, and 256 render outputs underpins the MTT S80 graphics board. The card also has 16GB of GDDR6 memory with a 14 GT/s data transfer rate linked to the GPU through a 256-bit interface, providing a maximum bandwidth of 448 GB/s.
In comparison, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has a peak compute performance of 16.2 FP32 TFLOPS, which is slightly higher than the MTT S80’s maximum compute capability of 14.4 FP32 TFLOPS. However, it is important to note that we have only seen these stats on paper, so it is necessary to test the MTT S80 AIB’s real-world performance in games.
The MTT S80 supports the proprietary MUSA API, OpenGL/OpenGL ES from Khronos Group, DirectX from Microsoft, and numerous customized APIs. Do not anticipate too much from the card at this time, though, as Moore Threads openly admits that its DirectX support is still in its infancy and that only 20 well-known games (such as Call of Duty, Crossfire, Counter-Strike, Diablo 3, League of Legends, etc.) are initially supported. To ensure compatibility and performance with the two well-known engines, the company claims that it is collaborating closely with the creators of Unity and Unreal Engine as well as game designers.
The video engine on the Chunxiao graphics chip is also capable of supporting up to 8K videos in the AV1, H.264, and H.265 codecs. Sadly, Moore Threads won’t say which players are compatible with its hardware-assisted video decoding. The MTT S80 AIB has one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4 interfaces.
Given that Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPUs enable a PCIe Gen4 bus, it is interesting to note that the MTT S80 is the first client graphics card in the world to provide a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface. The host interface of AMD’s most recent RDNA 3 GPUs, specifically the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon 7900 XTX, has not yet been made public.
At this time, JD.com is selling the Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card for ￥2999 ($373 excluding VAT). The AIB is packaged with the ￥1029 Asus TUF Gaming B660M-PLUS D4 motherboard, therefore it is not sold separately. The graphics board will cost $245 without VAT after deducting the motherboard’s value, which is a reasonable price given its computing capabilities. We can only speculate as to whether the product is genuinely worth $245 given that its performance is unknown.
While it may come as a surprise, China has multiple well-known chip producers. The majority primarily focus on the local market while designing client GPUs, whereas the remaining companies only target data centers (including AI and HPC). Since its founding in October 2020, Moore Threads has created GPUs for a variety of uses (apart from HPC), and it appears that it intends to market its goods outside of China. In order to ensure compatibility with western titles, the company sells its MTT S80 via JD.com, which distributes internationally and collaborates with makers of well-known engines and video game franchises.
Nonetheless, we will have to wait until 16th of November to find out how well does this card perform as the company will start shipping out the units at that date.
Until then, just avoid updating your Windows 11 to the latest version: Find out why.
