Moore Threads is China’s only developer of gaming graphics cards, and its first generation MTT S80 GPU just got a big driver update (via ITHome) that boosts performance tremendously, an important development now that the US government has banned Nvidia’s fastest gaming GPU, the RTX 4090, from the country. The MTT S80’s performance has now increased by double digits in five AAA titles, with one game getting an 80% improvement. For first-generation products, drivers are almost as important as the hardware itself, and it looks like the MTT S80 has room to grow even a year after it was released.
The new 240.50 version driver delivered the largest gains in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundswith an 80% boost to the average framerate. Meanwhile, the weakest improvement of the five was in Far Cry: New Dawnwhich still saw an improvement of 30%. Valuing and Grand Theft Auto V both stood at 60% more frames, and Race trim registered a 50% bump.
Additionally, the new driver also added support for 18 other games. These games may have actually run on the MTT S80 before, but perhaps not very well. Moore Threads didn’t detail how much better these games now run on the S80, though, which implies either their driver-side optimization didn’t have much of an impact, or that the games were so unplayable before that putting a number down would make little sense.
Drivers have always been tough to nail down for GPUs sporting new architectures, especially when those GPUs are also the company’s very first product. Even Intel, which had years of experience making drivers for integrated GPUs, has struggled to fully optimize its Arc Alchemist GPUs. Having launched over a year ago, Arc graphics cards are still getting driver updates with double and even triple-digit performance boosts.
Moore Threads has more problems beyond supporting a first-generation product. The company recently laid off a substantial amount of its workforce, which wasn’t all that big to begin with. This is all thanks to U.S. sanctions against Chinese GPUs, such as the ones that Moore Threads makes. Sanctions apparently haven’t stopped the company from working on its next-generation MTT S90 gaming GPU, which will hopefully benefit from the S80’s maturing drivers.
This latest round of drivers signals that the company is intent upon a steady cadence of updates, as its last round of driver updates earlier this year also provided substantial improvements.
