Lisuan's G100 series launches on 18 June, with preorders opening on 17 March, as announced at AWE 2026, a tech conference in China. For China's semiconductor industry, this is genuinely worth watching. This is the first time a Chinese company has potential to directly rival AMD and Nvidia's duopoly in the discrete GPU market. That sentence alone captures why the announcement matters beyond the enthusiast community.
The gaming GPU will be called Lisuan Extreme LX 7G106, while the professional GPU has been split into at least two, if not three, SKUs. The consumer-focused 7G106 features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, 192 texture units, 96 ROPs, and an FP32 throughput of up to 24 TFLOP/s. At the launch event, Lisuan said the LX 7G106 can play dozens of the most popular Steam games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, and the RE4 Remake.
The real achievement here is API support. DirectX 12 support is the baseline requirement for a large part of the current Windows game catalog, including many newer PC releases sold on Steam. DirectX support was clearly an Achilles heel for most Chinese GPU makers, so this is major news. This is not obvious infrastructure. Previous Chinese GPU efforts foundered precisely because they lacked this compatibility.
But there's a significant asterisk attached to performance claims. We've only really heard Lisuan itself talk about the performance of the G100 series; no independent reviews have come out since the initial announcement. Benchmark results paint a mixed but promising picture. In synthetic tests, the 7G106 scored 26,800 points in 3DMark Fire Strike and 2,256 in Steel Nomad, putting it roughly on par with Nvidia's RTX 4060 in Fire Strike. Geekbench 6 OpenCL saw it notch 111,290 points, edging out the RTX 4060 by around 10%. That middle benchmark looks encouraging. Yet its Fire Strike score is notably lower than NVIDIA's RTX 5060, RTX 5050, and AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT, all of which sit above 29,000 points.Lisuan itself has walked the performance tightrope carefully. In real-world tests, Lisuan showcased Black Myth: Wukong running at 4K High settings with playable framerates, though no exact frame rate was shared. No exact frame rate. That detail matters when comparing against published benchmarks from Nvidia and AMD.
The company's background adds useful context. Lisuan Technology is a Chinese company that was founded just 5 years ago in Shanghai by three former employees from the pioneering S3 Graphics GPU maker popular in the 1990s. With heavy investments from Chinese private and state companies, Lisuan Tech started developing GPUs that could provide alternative solutions to Nvidia and AMD for the Chinese market. That investment history underscores the policy incentive driving this product. The products are the result of four years of development and have now entered mass production. The cards are powered by the 7G100 rendering-and-inference integrated GPU, built on Lisuan's self-developed TrueGPU "Tiantu" architecture.
This matters because it sits within a larger pattern. China has developed a broad ecosystem of GPU and AI accelerator manufacturers to reduce its dependence on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. The Chinese government is promoting alliances and mandating the use of local chips in data centers, cutting NVIDIA's market share in its own country. Lisuan is one player among many; Moore Threads, Biren, and others are also building discrete GPUs for similar reasons.
The real question is whether this can move beyond the Chinese domestic market. We don't know how the LX G7106 stacks up against competing options from Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. A potential global launch will be largely predicated on how performant it really is without regional market restrictions. That last clause is diplomatically phrased. What it means is: if Lisuan wants to sell these in Australia, Europe, or North America, independent reviewers will tear into them with rigour that company demo units cannot survive.
For now, treating the G100 as a genuine engineering milestone is defensible. What sets Lisuan apart from past Chinese GPU attempts is its claim of building the TrueGPU architecture from scratch, including the instruction set, compute core, and software stack. Verification will come soon. By July or August, Australian tech sites and international reviewers should have retail units in hand. Until then, Lisuan's claims deserve cautious optimism, not either unbridled enthusiasm or reflexive scepticism.