Loongson 9A2000 is a next-gen Chinese GPU with GeForce RTX 2080 level performance

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080, the company's first consumer GPU to include dedicated AI hardware, launched in 2018. One of the flagship GPUs for the Turing generation (second to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at launch), it's still a powerful GPU in 2024. However, after six years, the mainstream GeForce RTX 4060 performs similarly in a much more efficient package.

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Chinese chipmaker Loongson is rumored to be working on a next-gen 9A2000 graphics card for PC will perform similarly to the GeForce RTX 2080, making it roughly eight to ten times faster than the company's other rumored product - the 9A1000 GPU. This news arrives via ITHome (translated); however, there is one big caveat.

Like other Chinese GPUs from Moore Threads, DirectX 12 compatibility is a question mark, so performance might be able to reach the heights of the GeForce RTX 2080 - but in-game performance on a per-title basis will most likely fall very short of that target.

According to ITHome, Loongson also has a more entry-level GPU on the way, the 9A1000, which targets Radeon RX 550 performance levels. These announcements were made at a recent investor or financial results meeting, where the company was asked if the next-gen 9A2000 graphics card could run the game of the moment, Black Myth: Wukong. The answer was that, theoretically, the game would run fine; however, it would come down to software support and drivers.

Loongson is also developing processors to rival AMD and Intel for running Windows, so it will be interesting to see how this all pans out. A Chinese company creating CPUs and GPUs for enthusiasts and PC gamers would present quite a shake-up.