China's Moore Threads MTT S80 GPU Review | A New Challenger Appears

This video looks at the history of the relatively new Moore Threads Technology, a recent competitor in the GPU space that was founded by a former NVIDIA employee. Moore Threads is part of a recent boom in China's domestic silicon design market, and it just shipped its first consumer GPUs -- the MTT S80 and MTT S70. We're benchmarking the MTT S80, testing the drivers, looking at the (awful) power consumption characteristics, and talking about implications in the market.



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00:00 - Defecting from NVIDIA
02:20 - The Political Motivations
04:27 - Marketing Claims
06:19 - An Unbelievable History
10:03 - The Drivers Kind of Suck
13:20 - Gaming Problems
16:52 - Benchmarks
17:17 - CSGO Benchmarks
18:32 - CSGO Frametimes Are Really Bad
19:56 - The Best Scenario: Diablo III
20:45 - Frametimes
21:18 - NFS HP Remastered
22:04 - Power Consumption
23:17 - Tear-Down
29:21 - Conclusion: Impressive Start, Long Road Ahead

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Steve Burke | Host, Testing, Writing
Patrick Lathan | Testing, Writing
Vitalii Makhnovets | Camera, Video Editing
Jeremy Clayton | Additional Research

[ThunderingRoar]

This just shows how incredibly difficult it is to make these things actually work. The whole blasting sand with electricity to do math and draw pixels on screen thing

[wyattarich]

I hope this puts into perspective for some people how amazingly well Arc has been doing since launch.

[Jakeyythetr]

When Steve said that they re-ran the 750 Ti I knew that something was going to be really bad

[mickocstreamarchive]

I think the memory layout is actually just for trace length, which would otherwise be longer for the chips at the top and bottom, rather than avoiding screw holes. You can see a similar thing on the old AMD R9 270X, for example - with no adjacent screw holes in that case.

[WXSTANG]

Issues aside, I think this is really cool to see Power VR in the GPU scene again. To create a modern day GPU is insanely difficult. Just to get it working like that must have been an incredible undertaking.

[RepsUp]

Just goes to show how difficult it is to enter the dGPU market, there's a reason why only 2 players survived (GeForce, Radeon) and now we have a 3rd one (Arc) after so many years.

[ianchristmas]

So nice to hear even a passing mention to Fairchild Semiconductor. Worked for them in '99 and loved the work running the Photo Lithography machines. Great power MOSFET's.

[spankyham]

Early days of nVidia and ATI were riddled with driver problems with games. I think this would be a good revisit in a year or so and see if the drivers matured.

[TheDemocrab]

The thing that interests me most about this GPU is that it's apparently based off of PowerVR IP and even shares parts of its driver code with some of the newer PowerVR GPUs. Meaning that technically the modern GPU landscape reflects the history of GPUs almost perfectly:

nVidia was one of the primary companies pushing 3D gaming and features that help make it better even back when 3DFX was king, today they've got the most features and usually the fastest GPUs even if you're going to be paying a lot for that.
ATi/AMD have always had an on/off reputation about drivers (I've had no major issues personally, but the reputation is undeniable whether you believe it's justified or not) and often haven't managed to be truly competitive on a performance level, but manage to make it up through increased value or features. One of their bigger successes with GPUs is being able to integrate their IP into AMDs CPUs for some of the fastest iGPUs around.
Intel was solely focused on ensuring you have a display output that can play a DVD or the like for a number of years until they started also focusing a bit more on gaming in an effort to stem competition from AMDs iGPUs, now they're trying to make full-fledged gaming focused dGPUs that relative lack of experience with gaming GPUs in general shows in that it's not a completely horrible experience but you'll absolutely run into bugs you won't see on nVidia or AMD.
Finally, PowerVR abandoned the desktop entirely around something like the year 2000 after the Kyro GPU failed, now we're seeing a modern dGPU based on their tech being practically useless because of all the issues and bugs due to the complete lack of not just 3D gaming GPU experience, but even (afaik anyway) a relative lack of focus on PCs in general.

[slickrounder]

This is probably what Nvidia thought it was competing against in the $400 price point when they launched their "4060ti"..

[Erelyes]

Have to express my thanks as a viewer to Tyler as well for providing the card to you guys.
I really wonder if a lot of the problems with the card are driver/firmware based and in six month's time, they manage to get it much improved on the same hardware. I hope so!

[corruptedpoison]

It's mind blowing to me that I see a video with 750ti benchmarks in 2023 that's relevant.

[SpaceMyName]

I am VERY excited to see more competitors, regardless of performance.

[toddyuen]

Bizarre never-seen-before grounding tab: This is most likely for debug to connect the ground wire of an oscilloscope or voltage probe. Many boards lack convenient grounding points for probing, which makes debug of prototype and production boards difficult. However, when I design a ground point into a card design, I include several on both sides of the board to minimize the ground lead length. I also use test point hardware that is easy to clip an alligator clip to without shorting to nearby components. Some might say that the preponderance of BGA packages makes this irrelevant, however, probing of connectors, resistors and intentionally added signal test pads is still done. Designers that don't provide access to critical signals for debug screw over the people responsible for board test.

[jkl]

I'm impressed that there are some that are even trying to take on the 3 GPU giants. I'm all for the good competitiveness.

[gail_blue]

This really makes me appreciate what Intel is doing.

[Nexxxeh]

I like the aesthetics and ease of teardown. Hopefully if it's PowerVR-based, they'll get up and running with actual performance under Linux for Vulkan and AI-related tasks. It could definitely find a niche in the west if cheap.

[HariGtt]

If I had to guess, the outer memory chips being "closer" to the GPU would be to have equal length traces with the other chips without having to do weird routes (or doing it less really)

[philtkaswahl]

That idle power draw was the most eye-raising thing for me, and there were eye-raising things aplenty in this review.

[jordant]

To put into perspective how bad these results are, the Steam Deck is a bit faster or the same performance as a 750Ti in most games (this is according to DF).

So at 15W the Steam Deck is about twice as fast as this card using over 130W.