After decades of relying almost entirely on Western imports, China has finally produced what many consider its first serious attempt at a consumer gaming GPU. The card, known as the Lisuan G100, has begun shipping this week, marking a symbolic milestone in China’s long push toward semiconductor self-reliance. But while the achievement is significant, early benchmark results suggest the road ahead will be long and uncomfortable.
China’s graphics ambitions did not emerge overnight. Early domestic GPUs, such as those developed by Jingjia Micro in the mid-2000s, were limited to military and aerospace use, lacking modern graphics APIs and consumer drivers. The real shift began after 2018, when US export controls and the global AI boom accelerated Beijing’s push to build an independent chip ecosystem. This period gave rise to several startups founded by former engineers from NVIDIA and AMD, including Moore Threads and Biren Technology.
Moore Threads made headlines in 2022 with the MTT S80, China’s first PCIe 5.0 gaming GPU. However, immature drivers and erratic performance meant it struggled to run modern games. Lisuan, founded in late 2021 by former Silicon Valley engineers, claims to have learned from those mistakes by focusing heavily on software alongside its “TrueGPU” architecture.
On paper, the Lisuan G100 looks ambitious. The company says it is built on a domestic 6 nm process and can deliver up to 24 TFLOPS of FP32 performance, putting it in the same class as Nvidia’s RTX 4060. It even supports Windows on ARM, a niche feature still not fully embraced by major Western GPU vendors, as reported by HowToGeek.
Reality appears far harsher. A leaked Geekbench OpenCL result shows the G100 scoring just 15,524 points, roughly equivalent to a GeForce GTX 660 Ti from 2012. Reported specifications in that test were equally concerning, including a 300 MHz clock speed, only 32 compute units, and an implausibly small 256 MB of VRAM. If accurate, those figures place the card firmly in last-decade territory.
There is still room for doubt. The benchmark may reflect an engineering sample misreporting data due to immature drivers, especially given the Windows 10 test setup. Lisuan argues that performance will improve as its software stack matures. Even so, the gap between marketing claims and observed results has raised skepticism.
Yet dismissing the G100 entirely would miss the larger picture. Designing a functional GPU from scratch, capable of running Windows and modern APIs like DirectX 12, is a major engineering achievement. Thanks to China’s Xinchuang initiative, which mandates large-scale adoption of domestic hardware, Lisuan already has a guaranteed market and feedback loop.
For now, Nvidia has little to fear in the gaming space. But the Lisuan G100 represents a “zero-to-one” moment. If China’s GPU startups can iterate quickly, this rough first step may eventually turn into genuine competition.
