I’ve always argued that we desperately need competition in the GPU space, which is why I was very happy when Intel broke into the GPU market—even as it only made mid-range and budget cards.
A new competitor from China is currently taking shape, but should NVIDIA be scared?
A history of Chinese GPUs
Even as this might be the first time we hear of Lisuan and its intent to release a consumer GPU, it’s been a long way here. For decades, China’s graphics processing landscape was defined by total reliance on Western imports, with domestic efforts largely confined to academic research or strictly military applications. As it turns out, though, the initial shift toward self-reliance actually began in 2006 with Jingjia Micro, which successfully produced the JM series of GPUs. These were specialized chips for aerospace and military use, lacking the DirectX support or driver maturity required for consumer markets, so they were not really good for gaming or consumer computers in general. But it was something.
The real turning point arrived around 2018, accelerated by escalating US trade drama and the global AI boom. This period saw the rise of the “Four Little Dragons”—startups like Biren Technology and Moore Threads—founded by returning veterans from NVIDIA and AMD. Moore Threads made the first significant consumer push in 2022 with the MTT S80.
While it was a historic milestone as the first domestic gaming card with PCIe 5.0, it struggled with immature drivers and inconsistent performance, and it failed to run modern titles smoothly.
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This is where Lisuan, a startup founded in late 2021 by a team of former Silicon Valley engineers, comes into play. Learning from its predecessors’ driver woes, Lisuan focused heavily on software optimization alongside its “TrueGPU” architecture, and this culminated in the release of the Lisuan G100, which is probably China’s most solid attempt at an actually usable GPU. They have just begun shipping as of today, so it’s not vaporware, and it’s a product that actually exists.
But is it any good?
This specific GPU is… Kind of a mixed bag. It’s supposed to be built on a 6nm process, and the G100 is, according to Lisuan, the first domestic chip to genuinely rival the NVIDIA RTX 4060 in raw performance, delivering 24 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. It even introduced support for Windows on ARM, a feature even major Western competitors had not fully prioritized.
It appears to fall short of its marketing promises, though. An alleged Geekbench OpenCL listing revealed the G100 achieving a score of only 15,524, a performance tier that effectively ties it with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, a card released in 2012. This places the “next-gen” Chinese GPU on par with 13-year-old hardware, making it one of the lowest-scoring entries in the modern database. The leaked specifications further muddied the waters, showing the device operating with only 32 Compute Units, a bafflingly low 300 MHz clock speed, and a virtually unusable 256 MB of video memory. We’ll likely see more benchmarks as the GPU makes its way to the hands of customers.
These “anemic” figures might represent an engineering sample failing to report correctly due to immature drivers—a theory supported by the test bed’s configuration of a Ryzen 7 8700G on Windows 10. But still, if true, the underlying silicon may still be fundamentally incapable of reaching the promised RTX 4060 performance targets, regardless of the actual specifications that are being reported.
Does it have a future?
Here’s the thing, though. Even if this card performs like a GeForce GTX 660 Ti, it’s still pretty good. Creating a functional GPU architecture from scratch—specifically one that relies on a domestic 6nm supply chain rather than TSMC—is an immense engineering triumph. The fact that the G100 boots, runs Windows, and executes modern APIs like DirectX 12 is the “zero to one” breakthrough. A bunch of the Lisuan G100’s issues could be patched with software, and even if the hardware and the silicon are to blame, Lisuan could definitely put something together in a few years that, at the very least, rivals NVIDIA and AMD in some segments.
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The good part is that thanks to the Chinese government’s Xinchuang initiative, where the state is aggressively replacing tens of millions of foreign computers with domestic alternatives, Lisuan is already going to have a lot of real-world users and a guaranteed captive market, which is going to be key as it ramps up R&D. This will hook Lisuan up with the funding and user data needed to iterate rapidly, shielded from the brutal open-market competition that killed Western startups like 3dfx.
When can we see a decent mid-range or even flagship chip from Lisuan just yet? No way to tell. It could be two years, it could be five, or it could be ten. But if the company plays its cards right, it might catch up quickly?
Will we be able to actually check them out stateside? Never say never, but considering how little actually Chinese electronics we get, it’s a gamble you might lose.