Despite the fact that the lion’s share of electronics for the world market is assembled at factories in China, and brands like Xiaomi are literally swept away by American competitors, for some reason many still believe in the myth of the low quality of Chinese products and the backwardness of local production. In fact, this is a long time ago – at the moment, Chinese companies have largely caught up with or even surpassed their competitors due to obvious advantages, such as the insane volume of the domestic market. And today I decided to tell you how this affects the video card market, where all companies from the Celestial Empire can be divided into three categories.
Category 1: World-class Chinese brands
The first category includes video cards from manufacturers that work directly with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. They license the PCB with the GPU, memory, and other components from the manufacturer, after which they add their proprietary cooling system, consisting of an aluminum heatsink, fans, and a decorative shroud. The result is approximately the same video card as any partner company of a major manufacturer, only from a Chinese brand with a proprietary design and a cooler. You will be surprised, but there are a huge number of such companies cooperating with NVIDIA or AMD.
For example, Zotac, Inno3D, Sapphire, KFA2, and Colorful are wildly popular in the market, including outside of China. Manufacturers use a quality component base, they have the same graphics chip as everyone else, as well as the circuit board. Accordingly, the only thing left for Chinese brands is to design the casing of the cooling system, install branded fans and you can pack it for sale – and everything has been fine with the design in China lately. In addition, some Colorful and KFA2 models end up with more attractive temperatures and performance than competitors from ASUS or MSI.
It is important to note that these are quite large manufacturers with large factories, a high level of quality control and good marketing – video cards of these brands often act as sponsors at major eSports championships, so even people who are far from the topic of computer hardware, these names at least sometimes, but hear.
Category 2: AliExpress kings that few people have heard of
However, there are manufacturers in China who also make video cards based on NVIDIA and AMD graphics chips, but they no longer have such volumes, there are no large factories, advertising at tournaments and other PR. We are talking about companies like Maxsun, Yeston and Onda – probably, if you have not read our article about assembling a PC with AliExpress, then you have never heard these names before. The products of these companies have an important bonus in certain scenarios – they are cheaper than potential competitors from the same Zotac or KFA2. And if we are talking about assembling a budget computer for video games, then most often it is in the direction of these manufacturers that potential buyers look.
But, as with everything inexpensive in this world, there are certain pitfalls. For example, since brands do not have such huge production volumes, they are most often assembled practically in basement factories without the necessary quality control. Problems with such cards are extremely common, it is far from always possible to get a warranty repair, plus you need to understand that in this case there is no need to talk about any support from the manufacturer. Fan failures, firmware issue, or memory chips just getting hot? Rather, they will help in the local gray service center. However, given the sea of offers, low prices and designs for every taste, these video cards still sell well.
Category 3: really Chinese video cards
There are also companies in China that have nothing to do with NVIDIA or AMD. They produce their own video cards with proprietary architecture, graphics core and other technologies. More precisely, they say that they produce, but in reality no one has seen them. For example, many people remember Innosilicon for its loud announcement of its own video card, which was supposed to compete with the mid-range NVIDIA video cards. The manufacturer showed slides with beautiful graphics, promised low power consumption and impressive FPS in video games. The problem is that it was two years ago, and the video card was never released.
Moore Threads worked in a similar way – the company received a lot of investments, including from the giants Lenovo and Tencent, gathered a seemingly large team of specialists and even announced two video cards. True, it was in 2020 – since then nothing has been heard about the company’s new products, and the models shown at the presentation have not yet fallen into the hands of even video game developers, let alone journalists. It turned out that just developing a video card “on paper” is not enough – you also need to create software so that this video card can work at least in some scenarios. And for this you need a little more than beautiful slides and a team of specialists.
Accordingly, the situation with exclusively Chinese video cards is now deplorable – companies seeking to create their own, and not cooperate with large manufacturers of graphics chips, can not yet show absolutely nothing. Competing at this level requires years of testing and testing, software tuning, building infrastructure and factories, and support from app and video game developers. Even taking into account the huge domestic market, this is an extremely difficult task. On the other hand, about five years ago, they talked about processors in the same way, which are now in China already catching up with past generations of Intel and AMD. So just give China some time.
There is no need to do your own
In fact, the local production of video cards in China is not developing as actively as the same processors, because there is no such critical need for this. All efforts to replace imports of Intel and AMD processors, which come from the government of the Celestial Empire, are aimed at removing the burden of dependence on American developments from the country. Because in the event of sanctions, as was the case with Huawei smartphones, a huge country will lose its ability to exist – imagine modern factories without processors or research centers without new computing power.
With video cards, everything is easier – the lion’s share of graphics accelerators is aimed at gamers, streamers and, fortunately already in the past, miners. In the event that this audience is deprived of the opportunity to buy a fresh video card, in fact, the country will not be under a serious blow, because this does not affect production capacity, the work of government agencies, the army or science in any way. Which, of course, are provided with computing power based on research centers, government universities and supercomputers. It is possible that video cards are also used for this purpose, but this is secret data that we will never know about. Because of this, in China there are only a couple of manufacturers of their video cards that actually do not produce anything, and a whole scattering of NVIDIA partner companies – this is simply not the segment in which you need to strain.
Source: Trash Box
Johanna Foster is an expert opinion writer with over 7 years of experience. She has a reputation for delivering insightful and thought-provoking articles on a variety of subjects. Her work can be found on some of the top online news websites, and she is currently lending her voice to the world stock market.
