The latest 100% Chinese-made GPU may still lag behind an RTX 3060 but it could be the start of something big in graphics cards

If you want to buy a graphics card for your gaming desktop PC, you'll be selecting the GPU that powers it from just one of three manufacturers: AMD, Intel, or Nvidia. What you might not know is that there are two more options, though neither is really worth considering. Not yet, at least, because Lisuan's new LX 7G100 is perhaps the first 100% Chinese-made graphics card capable of running a modern DirectX 12 game.

YouTube tech channel 潮玩客 (chaowanke) is the first to have its hands on the Lisuan graphics card (via Videocardz), and in the review, the team put the GPU through a raft of gaming benchmarks, pitching it against an Arc B580, GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 4060, and a Radeon RX 6600 XT.

The overall results are perhaps not entirely unexpected, with the 7G100 falling well short of the mark. For example, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at 1080p Medium, the Lisuan graphic card averages 71 fps, with 1% lows of 46 fps. In contrast, the slowest of the western trio, the RX 6600 XT, hit 159 fps on average.

It's a similar story across all of the games that chaowanke tested, and the only test in which the 7G100 came close to the competition was in 3DMark's FireStrike and Steel Nomad, where it narrowly edged out the RTX 3060. Other than them, it was notably slower. Off the top of my head, I'd say the performance figures are more akin to a GeForce GTX 1660, but my memory is wobbly at the best of times.

Anyway, while that might seem like a miserable showing, there's definitely promise in the GPU architecture. The chip contains no support for hardware ray tracing or matrix units with which to accelerate AI upscaling, but it was able to run modern games with nary a hiccup, which is a considerable improvement over China's other home-grown gaming GPU, the Moore Threads MTT S80.

Unfortunately, Lisuan is caught between a rock and a hard place with pricing. The performance suggests it should be dirt cheap, but if the LX 7G100 was sold for peanuts, the company would have little return for investing in the development of its GPUs. This is almost certainly why it has actually pitched its 'Founders Edition' card at roughly 3,300 yuan, which equates to a fraction over $485.

It knows it won't sell very many, so the only way to generate some decent income is to charge a pretty penny for a card that's of only interest to GPU enthusiasts and collectors. While Moore Threads took a long time to get its act together concerning drivers, Lisuan has done things properly: Get the software right now, bring better chips to market later.

None of the big three GPU makers is going to be worried about what Lisuan has achieved, but none of their first graphics cards was very good either. China's PC industry has made great strides in recent years, especially in areas such as memory, SSDs, peripherals, and monitors, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the graphics card market looks decidedly different by the end of the decade.