A new challenger approaches! Chinese military-civilian (whatever the heck that is) electronic component designer Changsha Jingjia Microelectronics has confirmed it’s developing its own dedicated graphics cards. If you’ve never heard of them then that’s probably because they’ve been busy constructing chips for fighter jets over the past decade.

Jingjia Micro has a grand total of two GPUs in development, comprising a lower-end GPU alongside a more powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 equivalent. This isn’t its first foray into graphics cards but it’s certainly their first in a long while.

The higher-end model is the one that’ll probably earn the most headlines. The JM9271 offers performance which is allegedly in line with a GTX 1080. It comes with 16GB HBM memory, provides 512GB/s memory bandwidth, and has a core clocked at around 1.8 GHz. It also runs through PCIe 4.0 so it’s one step ahead of the GTX 1080 in this department.

However, it’s not all good news for Jingjia Micro. It’s clearly nowhere near up to speed with AMD and Nvidia’s technology so it’s using the relatively old-school 28nm fabrication process and also comes with a power-sipping 200W TDP.

Down at the lower end of the scale is the JM9231 GPU. Jingjia Micro claim this is a tiny bit faster than a GeForce GTX 1050, albeit coming with a fairly ludicrous 8GB GDDR5 memory support 256 GB/s memory bandwidth. It comes in at double the wattage of the GTX 1050 as well, guzzling down 150W.

Both of these GPUs biggest downfalls though are they both only support OpenGL 4.5. There’s no Vulkan or DirectX graphics API support whatsoever.

At the moment it’s still a little unclear whether Jingjia will be releasing these as consumer graphics cards, although it certainly feels like the smart move if it wants to capture that vast market.

For those of us outside China this probably won’t matter a great deal. We’ll soon have three brands to choose from once Intel steps into the ring next year, and competition should be fairly fierce. AMD and Nvidia will be keeping a wary eye on Jingjia Micro though. China’s a massive market and they won’t be keen to see sales dip over there if a new China-focused contender does weigh in.