Chinese GPU maker Lisuan has announced promising launch figures for its homegrown graphics card. The LX 7G100 has seemingly crossed the 30,000-preorder mark in just two days, and that’s despite the lukewarm early benchmarks.
According to Lisuan Tech, the LX 7G100 managed to rack up these orders in just 48 hours, showing great enthusiasm from Chinese gamers for an in-house alternative to the big three: Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. For reference, the card is sold for about $485 in China, which means that the company has accumulated over $14.55 million in sales. Understandably, this isn’t net revenue as it doesn’t account for the exact BOM (Bill of Materials) cost of the LX 7G100, which remains undisclosed.
Competing in the long term requires Lisuan to secure a comfortable margin to finance future product developments, if it ever hopes to compete with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. The latter showed how hard it is to join the dedicated GPU market despite its extensive experience with iGPUs.
Though not a guarantee of future sales, this early success is a good sign for Lisuan, showing that the Chinese market is receptive to homegrown products, even if price/performance value isn’t there yet. As a reminder, the LX 7G100 is advertised as a competitor to Nvidia’s RTX 4060, yet the first gaming reviews are nowhere near that performance level. For example, the LX 7G100 only pushes 88fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 150fps in GTA V, and 57fps in The Witcher 3, compared to 220fps, 290fps, and 76fps, respectively, using the RTX 4060. This repositions its real-world performance more in line with RTX 3060, a much cheaper GPU.
Whether those who pre-ordered the card did so knowingly is hard to say, but what is sure is that Lisuan managed to convince many customers who could have easily opted for another competitor. Among these cards is an exclusive batch limited to 1,000 units using a so-called Founders Edition cooler. The company indicated that it plans to release a second batch of these cards, shipping on June 18.
This model measures 294mm x 120mm x 49mm and comes equipped with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. The card supports Direct3D 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 3.0. It offers four DisplayPort 1.4a ports capable of displaying up to 8K at 60Hz with HDR and FreeSync, while supporting DSC (Display Stream Compression). The GPU can also decode 8K 60fps HEVC video streams.
This rapid success landed Lisuan Tech in the spotlight as the company climbed to sixth position among big brands on e-commerce platform JD.com. Whether this is a passing consumer curiosity remains to be seen. Hopefully, this is the birth of a new GPU maker capable of competing against the big three. And don’t judge it by its current GPU performance; Intel’s Arc A series was far from perfect at launch and a far cry from what the B series currently offers.
Even if its products aren’t the highest-performing on the market right now, Lisuan can improve its architecture in the future as it gains knowledge. Everybody has to start from somewhere, of course. We surely won’t mind having a fourth serious competitor in the gaming segment.
