China’s final gaming GPU hits a efficiency wall — LX 7G100 barely crawls previous AMD’s nine-year-old RX 580; hyped as an RTX 4060 rival, China’s LX 7G100 trails RTX 2060 by 35%

Despite robust launch gross sales, the Lisuan Tech LX 7G100 was clearly extra of a home win for China than a contender towards the most effective graphics playing cards in the marketplace. Recent benchmark outcomes printed by German outlet PC Games Hardware (PCGH) present that the Chinese-made LX 7G100 nonetheless has an extended solution to go, providing solely comparable efficiency to the nine-year-old Radeon RX 580 — however trailing by as a lot as 35% behind the seven-year-old GeForce RTX 2060.

Originally touted as a competitor to the GeForce RTX 4060, the LX 7G100 hit the market with excessive expectations. Initial benchmarks, nonetheless, shortly dispelled a lot of the early hype. Now, 4 months after its launch and following a number of driver updates, we as soon as once more see the LX 7G100 within the highlight, however regardless of ongoing driver refinements, the graphics card’s efficiency appears to be like prefer it has flatlined.

The LX 7G100’s present efficiency intently matches AMD’s Radeon RX 580 and delivers a modest 5% boost over the Polaris-based card. It also outpaces Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB by a notable 23%. In its current state, the LX 7G100 does not have what it takes to challenge more modern models in the upper echelon of the mid-range graphics card market.

The LX 7G100 lags by more than 2.2X behind current models, such as the GeForce RTX 4060 or GeForce RX 5050. When benchmarked against the latest GeForce RTX 5060, the LX 7G100 delivers only about a third of the performance. An obvious technological gap remains between Lisuan Tech and industry giants such as Nvidia, AMD, and even Intel, and it still has a lot of catching up to do.

Lisuan Tech LX 7G100 Benchmarks

In its defense, the LX 7G100 has already cleared one of the biggest hurdles that typically hinder Chinese chipmakers: driver support. Many graphics cards from emerging Chinese manufacturers have historically suffered from poor compatibility and software support. Lisuan Tech not only became the first Chinese chipmaker to obtain WHQL support for a graphics card, but the LX 7G100 launched with stable DirectX 12 gaming compatibility from the get-go. This alone has enabled the LX 7G100 to run a wide variety of modern games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Battlefield 6, to name a few.

Lisuan Tech is clearly committing to improving its drivers. In the past four months alone, the Chinese chipmaker has rolled out three WHQL-certified driver updates. Drivers take time to mature, and given that the LX 7G100 has not even been on the market for a year, it is unreasonable to expect Lisuan Tech to match decades of expertise like Nvidia and AMD.

From a hardware standpoint, the LX 7G100, which leverages TSMC’s N6 FinFET process node, is not a bad graphics card. The silicon houses 6,144 shading units and clocks up to 2,000 MHz to deliver a peak FP32 performance of 24.5 TFLOPs. The LX 7G100’s 12GB of GDDR6 memory runs across a 192-bit memory interface to provide a maximum bandwidth of up to 432 GB/s. On paper, these metrics place the LX 7G100 close to the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB or Radeon RX 6700 XT. Currently, the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB is twice as fast as the LX 7G100.

A 2X performance gap is certainly not something that’s easy to close. Who knows just how much is left in the tank for the LX 7G100. Maybe Lisuan Tech has already pushed the hardware to its limits, or maybe some driver magic will put the LX 7G100 a few steps closer to the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB. Only time will tell, and it will be interesting to revisit the LX 7G100 in a few months’ time.

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