China’s first gaming GPU, the Lisuan G100, performs like a 13-year-old Nvidia GTX 660 Ti

Facepalm: China recently unveiled its first gaming GPU, the Lisuan G100. Built on a 6nm process, the card was touted as a potential rival to Nvidia’s RTX 4060. However, a recent Geekbench listing suggests its performance is closer to that of the 13-year-old GeForce GTX 660 Ti or the 10-year-old Radeon R9 370.

The listing also appears to reveal shockingly anemic specifications, including just 32 Compute Units, 256 MB of VRAM, and a 300 MHz GPU clock. Overall, the card managed a score of only 15,524 points in OpenCL, making it one of the worst-performing GPUs in the Geekbench database.

On the surface, the specifications and benchmark results suggest that the G100 is a severely underpowered GPU – at least a decade behind modern offerings from Nvidia and AMD. However, it seems unlikely that a 6nm card would actually ship with such outdated hardware in 2025.

What likely happened here is that the test was conducted during the sampling stage, where unoptimized firmware and drivers resulted in the low reported VRAM and clock speeds. As for the FP32 performance, it can’t be accurately determined without knowing the GPU’s execution unit subsystem configuration.

The test bed for the G100 featured a Ryzen 7 8700G CPU and 64 GB of DDR5-4800 memory installed on a Colorful Battle-AX B650M-Plus motherboard. Interestingly, the PC was running Windows 10 instead of Windows 11.

Lisuan Technology announced last month that it had successfully powered on its prototype G100 GPU. Based on the company’s in-house TrueGPU architecture, the chip is manufactured on a 6nm-grade process, most likely by the Shanghai-based semiconductor foundry SMIC.

Lisuan describes the G100 as China’s first indigenous 6nm GPU and claims it will deliver performance on par with Nvidia’s RTX 4060. While the Geekbench listing suggests it could fall well short of that target, the retail units will likely ship with optimized firmware and drivers that better showcase the hardware’s true capabilities.

It’s unclear when the G100 will hit the market, but online speculation points to mass production starting later this year or early next year. Whether the GPU can deliver the performance, stability, and efficiency initially promised by Lisuan remains to be seen, but more details will likely emerge in the coming weeks and months.