Chinese Lisuan LX 7G100 graphics card fails to run modern games
Chinese company Lisuan Tech has released its first gaming graphics accelerator, the LX 7G100, based on its proprietary TrueGPU architecture.
Earlier, individual synthetic tests suggested the graphics card could approach the performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 and even faster solutions, but independent testing by PC Games Hardware revealed a very different picture in real games.
PCGH specialists tested the Lisuan LX 7G100 in 14 modern games at native Full HD (1080p) resolution with maximum graphics settings and without ray tracing. The test bench included AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an ASRock X870E Taichi motherboard, and 32 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM.
Gaming performance
In none of the 14 games tested was the LX 7G100 able to reach 30 fps. The graphics card came closest to this mark in Battlefield 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3, where it showed 27 and 26 fps, respectively. In Alan Wake 2, the frame rate dropped below 10 fps.
At the same time, results depend heavily on settings. PCGH notes that with a moderate reduction in graphics quality, Baldur’s Gate 3, Battlefield 6, Cyberpunk 2077, Days Gone Remastered, Dying Light: The Beast, Forza Horizon 5, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 can already be launched at an acceptable frame rate.
In the PCGH LX 7G100 aggregate gaming index, it only slightly outperformed the 2017 Radeon RX 580 8 GB, but proved to be 23% slower than the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB. The GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB is 55% faster than the Chinese graphics card, and the Radeon RX 6600 is 80% faster.
The synthetic test results look noticeably better. In 3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme, the LX 7G100 performs roughly on par with the GeForce RTX 2060 12 GB, while in Steel Nomad Light, it sits between the Radeon RX 6600 and the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB. Thus, synthetic benchmarks significantly overestimate its capabilities relative to real-world gaming.
Driver issues
The main limitation of the LX 7G100 remains software support. Out of 20 games in the main PCGH test suite, only 14 could be tested. Two titles exhibited graphical artifacts, and another ran extremely unstably.
In Forza Motorsport and Call of Duty, the system reported an unsupported graphics card. A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem failed to launch due to a missing required shader model, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 crashed with a Device Hung error.
The TrueGPU architecture supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan, but the LX 7G100 lacks dedicated hardware acceleration blocks for ray tracing and matrix computing. Consequently, games requiring hardware ray tracing, such as Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Doom: The Dark Ages, do not run on this graphics card.
The driver includes an overclocking mode. In six tested PCGH games, it increased the frame rate by at least 8%, and in Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, the gain reached 10%.
Price
The standard retail version of the Lisuan LX 7G100 is sold in China for 2688 yuan ($401). The previously limited Founders Edition was offered for 3299 yuan ($492).
At the same time, PCGH considers the LX 7G100 a notable step forward compared to the Chinese Moore Threads MTT S80. Most of the tested games run on it without serious graphical errors, but in terms of performance in modern AAA titles, Lisuan’s first gaming graphics card is currently on par with AMD and NVIDIA solutions from several years ago.
