WTF?! China's first serious attempt at a homegrown gaming GPU might not be worrying Nvidia or AMD when it comes to performance, but it's already managed to create a rush of buyers. Lisuan Technology says the LX 7G100 Founder Edition drew more than 30,000 reservations within 48 hours, while the first limited batch sold out almost instantly through its JD.com storefront.
As we reported last week, the LX 7G100 is more impressive as a milestone for China than as a value proposition. A review of the 12GB card showed it running a range of modern games with few major crashes, which is no small achievement for a new GPU vendor using its own hardware, architecture, driver stack, and software ecosystem.
The problem is that simply working is not the same as competing. The card often lands around RTX 3060 territory in 3DMark, but actual game performance is less flattering. Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.
That performance might not be so bad if it were priced right. The LX 7G100 Founder Edition was listed at 3,299 RMB, or about $455, before subsidies, putting it close to much more powerful mainstream cards from established vendors, such as Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 16GB.
