Moore Threads MTT S80 gets DX12 support in beta driver, two years after launch — but 3D performance is still lags the GTX 1650

When Moore Threads introduced its MTT S80 and MTT S3000 graphics cards based on the Chunxiao architecture, roughly two years ago, the company touted both decent performance and feature sets. Yet, the company admitted that it would take some time to develop proper drivers supporting the latest application programming interfaces (APIs) and games. As noticed by @Loeschzwerg_3DC, it has taken the company about two years to release its first DirectX 12 driver.

Launching a beta driver supporting DirectX 12 is a rather big deal for Moore Threads. Its graphics boards have consistently lagged behind the best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia both in terms of performance and features. For now, Moore Threads’s MTT S80 can support numerous DirectX 12 capabilities (not all of them, of course, as the Chunxiao architecture does not support ray tracing, mesh shaders, VRS, etc.). Testing shows it can now run the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the Steel Nomad benchmark, and some Chinese games that require DX12.

Sadly, the performance of the Moore Thread MTT S80 graphics card does not really impress, according to preliminary tests conducted by @Loeschzwerg_3DC. The board scores 3,783 points in 3DMark Time Spy (3,452 graphics score, 8,315 CPU score), which is lower than the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 (around 4,400 points) when used with Intel’s six-core Core i5-11400 CPU. Over time, Moore Threads can probably increase the performance of its MTT S80 when running DirectX 12 workloads, though this will unlikely make this graphics card competitive in terms of performance with modern add-in-boards from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.

When tested with the DirectX API Overhead Feature Test (designed to test the overhead of DX11, DX12, and Mantle APIs), the MTT S80 scored 398,246 draw calls per second in multi-thread mode and 403,078 draw calls per second in single-thread mode. Such results are lower than those of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 and look worse than those of 10-year old GPUs, which pretty much indicates the quality of Moore Threads’s drivers in their present form.

Of course, we cannot draw solid conclusions about the quality of Moore Threads’s DirectX 12 drivers based on a single report. However, considering that drivers have plagued the performance of the MTT S80 for two years, we really cannot expect the company’s DX12 drivers to be perfect from day one.