China's somehow magicked up a GPU to rival NVIDIA's RTX 5060, and the Lisuan G100 has 12GB VRAM

Not so long ago, GPUs made in China were something of a spectacle, boasting performance levels that meant they weren't taken seriously - but some serious progress has seemingly been made with the Lisuan G100.

As you may recall, just a month ago, the Lisuan G100's performance couldn't match the NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti, but now the board is apparently faster than the RTX 4060, and not too far off the RTX 5060.

That's based on a reported Geekbench OpenCL run (as flagged by Benchleaks, add your own salt) where the still-unreleased G100 scored 111,290 points (being run in conjunction with a Ryzen 5 7600 processor).

The G100 isn't close to release yet - mass production probably won't happen until 2026, but that said, small shipments could be trickling out soon enough.

Wccftech calls the G100 a 'high-end' GPU and while that's obviously not correct - the NVIDIA xx60 class it matches for performance is at the entry-level, of course - the gravity of this achievement should not be played down.

GPU alchemy of sorts (with 12GB on-board, too)

As noted at the outset, China has not been at this game long, but it already has the wherewithal to develop a GPU - from scratch - to be in the same ballpark as a contemporary NVIDIA consumer workhorse of a graphics card.

The difficulty of this shouldn't be underestimated, and not just the feat of designing the architecture and producing the hardware, but also the software and driver side of the equation too - creating all this from the ground up.

To say China is catching up fast in the GPU sphere really is an understatement, and the pace of development here is nothing short of blistering.

Remember, this is an entirely domestic effort, with the chip supposedly built on 6nm SMIC (the partly state-owned Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) - with the GPU being paired with 12GB of VRAM (NVIDIA, take note there).

Okay, so, true enough, drawing level is one thing, and out-innovating to get ahead is entirely another. But right now, given the apparent progress with the Lisuan G100, what China might be able to achieve by the close of the decade could possibly boggle the mind.

Lisuan isn't the only player in China, either, because as Wccftech points out, there's also the likes of outfits such as Moore Threads and BirenTech working to produce more powerful consumer GPUs for the Chinese market.

The longer-term picture for consumer graphics cards could be changed profoundly as a result, and those seriously fed up with the way GPU pricing has gone in contemporary times are likely to be excited at that prospect. These domestic Chinese GPUs are certainly efforts to watch closely over the next few years.