China has officially powered on the first homegrown gaming GPU, the Lisuan G100, marking a major milestone in the nation’s drive for semiconductor independence.
What You Need to Know
Lisuan Technology, a Shenzhen-based startup founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, introduced the G100, a 6 nm node GPU based on its self-designed TrueGPU architecture
Early Benchmarks: Modest Performance So Far
In early Geekbench/OpenCL scores, the G100 achieved 15,524 points, comparable to a 13-year-old Nvidia GTX 660 Ti, with 32 Compute Units, only 256 MB VRAM, and a clock speed of 300 MHz. These scores place it near Nvidia’s GTX 660 Ti and AMD Radeon R9 370, signaling that it’s still a far way from modern mid-range GPUs techspot.com.
Lisuan attributes this early performance dip to immature firmware and drivers—expected at this pre-production stage
Ambitious Specs & Future Roadmap
Despite underwhelming benchmarks, Lisuan claims the G100 aims to support DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenGL 4.6, with a goal to match Nvidia’s RTX 4060 performance, though this remains unverified
The G100 has entered the tape-out and risk-trial phase, and Lisuan plans engineering sample shipments in Q3 2025, with mass production in 2026, pending yield and driver improvements
Why It Matters
- Sovereignty push: This GPU marks China’s first attempt to break reliance on foreign chips from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel
- Industry momentum: It joins efforts from Moore Threads, Biren, and others in building a domestic GPU ecosystem
- High barrier ahead: Hardware is just one part—the software, drivers, and ecosystem maturity are equally critical and still lagging .
What’s Next?
| Stage | Timeline | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| Driver optimization | Mid to late 2025 | Improve performance, fix stability |
| Engineering samples | Q3 2025 | Get GPUs into hands of OEMs and testers |
| Mass production | 2026 | Launch consumer-grade cards for gaming and compute |
