China’s quest to achieve complete independence in the field of semiconductors has taken a new step. The problem is that this step has not been as promising as we expected, and in fact it makes it clear that today the Asian giant is still far from the semiconductor manufacturers that dominate the market.
The alternative for gamers that promised. Lisuan Tech (砺算科技), a Chinese company dedicated to manufacturing semiconductors and solutions such as graphics cards for the end-user market, has launched its new GPU for the consumer market, the LX-7G100.
The price and expectations. The official starting price is 3,299 yuan (about 420 euros at the exchange rate), and at that price the equivalent graphics card should be at least an RTX5060 Ti, which is usually below 400 euros. What we get in performance is far from that.
The LX-7G100’s performance tests typically fell well short of the RTX 3060. Source: NotebookCheck.
Worse than the RTX 3060. The problem is that those who have had access to this graphics card and have evaluated its performance have realized that this manufacturer’s GPU is very far from that price/performance estimate. In fact, it usually competes more with the 2021 RTX 3060, but even with it it loses: it offers approximately 65% of the performance of its NVIDIA rival.
Good specifications. On paper, the LX-7G100 should offer more performance. It has a 7G106 GPU, 12 GB of GDDR6 memory and decent bandwidth, for example. However, it does not have truly mature support for DX12 and does not offer an alternative to Nvidia’s DSLL or AMD’s FSR. When used in modern games, performance plummets due to rendering glitches and code translation bottlenecks.
Not even for AI. At Lisuan Tech they have also tried to bet on their ability to run local and private AI models. However, most of the development of AI projects is linked to Nvidia’s CUDA architecture. It is true that the Chinese company has its own compatibility layer to translate PyTorch and CUDA code to its native architecture, but the loss of efficiency is notable, which makes inference or local model training tasks become too slow compared to those allowed by Nvidia graphics.
difficult to compete. Lisuan Technology announced the first milestones of this launch a year ago. Rumors indicated that its G100 graphics processor is manufactured by SMIC with a 6nm photolithographic process that complies with US restrictions. An attempt was made to launch in 2023, but Lisuan had financial problems and a capital injection of $27.7 million managed to keep the project going. It remains to be seen if sales ultimately follow through, although certainly its price/performance ratio makes it attractive only to audiences like the Chinese, who may have more difficulties accessing models like the Nvidia RTX.
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