The Moore Threads MTT S8 is a general consumer graphics card designed and manufactured in China. That is what makes it so special that this is the country’s new step towards achieving its long-awaited technological independence from the West. Its characteristics were a priori promising, because this graphics card based on the MUSA architecture and manufactured at the 12 nm node 4,096 shaders, 16 GB of graphics memory and PCIe Gen5 support.

Alas, those impressive specs they are nothing but a mirage. The South Korean media had the opportunity to test the Moore Threads MTT S8 and the first thing they pointed out is that the installation and configuration process is not easy, as this graphics card is only compatible with certain motherboards and with certain monitors.

In addition to these limitations, we must add that it does not support the latest versions of Windows and that it is not even compatible with many current games, which is understandable, because as if that were not enough, its support is limited. moment, to DirectX 9and it doesn’t support tessellation in games, a feature that was revolutionary in its day and is necessary today to avoid the archaic flat textures that were common in games more than 15 years ago.

In a performance test that Moore Threads MTT S8 ran, it went up against two fairly old graphics cards, even though they are still functional today, GeForce GTX 1060 and GeForce GT 1030. The former was a mid-range model and is still quite capable at 1080p today, while the latter was low-end and unable to smoothly handle today’s demanding games.

The results achieved by Moore Threads MTT S8 are terribly poor because in most cases it’s less than half the power of the GeForce GT 1030 at 252 wattswhile the NVIDIA graphics card consumes 30 watts. You could say it’s a driver issue, but the source clearly indicates that the MUSA architecture is very inefficient and seems to have major flaws. Adding to this poor performance is the complete lack of support in a professional environment and the lack of AV1 decoding.

The truth is that it is the first step and as such you have to understand that developing a GPU from scratch is not exactly easy. Now that Moore Threads has a foundation to work with, this phase of R&D should begin to refine and improve this architecture, and we may see more competent products in the future, both in terms of performance and efficiency.