China’s Fenghua No.1 GPU may be able to compete with the Nvidia RTX 3060. In our current generation of graphics cards, there is a new rival at the low end that we should keep an eye on.
Welcome to the Fenghua No. 1, a 12nm GPU from China that is rumoured to be a competitor to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. “The first domestic 4K-level high-definition desktop graphics card to complete mutual certification” is what the company claims.
“The first domestic 4K-level high-definition desktop graphics card to complete mutual certification” is what the company claims. I’ll get to that in a minute.
The card, which was developed by Xindong Technology and Innosilicon, was officially announced some time in November of the following year. ITHome (via Tom’s Hardware) has described it as having “excellent performance,” at least when used in conjunction with the Tongxin UOS operating system, which is why we’re talking about it now.
As a result, you may want to wait until someone else has done some testing before making a final decision, especially given the fact that the testing is being done by the product’s own manufacturers.
According to reports, when the Fenghua No. 1 is crammed into one of Innosilicon’s machines for “complete in-depth adaption certification,” its performance at 4K is comparable to that of the RTX 3060 in some ways. We have no idea who has what respect.
It’s all we know for now, but the RTX 3060 may well be able to compete with this 12nm GPU, which boasts 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of GDDR6X memory (19Gbps maximum) and supports not only HDMI2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4, but even VGA!
The Fenghua No.1 does, however, support modern graphics-improvement techniques such as OpenGL and Vulkan, among other things. There is currently no information available on its ray tracing performance, however we do know that it supports x86, ARM, Loongson, and other instruction set processors. The likelihood is that this card is not intended for gamers, but rather for server administrators.
Additionally, according to Tom’s Hardware, “prior research revealed that Fenghua No. 1 is based on Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR architecture, though we can’t be certain.” The Series 1 PowerVR card is a 350nm GPU from the 1990s with only 4MB of VRAM and base clock speeds of roughly 66MHz. It is still in production today.
Oh, what a long way we’ve come in the intervening years. Moreover, while the RTX 3060 isn’t a very high bar in comparison to the rest of the high-end GPU market take, for example, the RTX 3090 Ti an it’s excellent starting point for anyone looking for a budget, current-gen card.
It will be possible to confirm how well the Fenghua No. 1 performs versus the RTX 3060, as well as the RX 6600 XT, once several more people have managed to get their hands on one and put it to the test. We’ll have to accept Innosilicon’s word for it for the time being.
