Images Surface of Chinese Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise Discrete GPU

Images of a Glenfly Arise-GT10C0 discrete graphics card, and its exposed GPU, have been shared on Chinese social media platform Bilibili by user Hoki. This is a very basic graphics card by modern measures, with a boxy and utilitarian half-shroud cooler, and outputs limited to just VGA and HDMI. Moreover, the Bilibili post indicates that software support is still shaky, at least in Windows 10. So it’s extremely unlikely that AMD or Nvidia need to worry about losing a spot on our best graphics card list anytime soon. 

The image above shows the Glenfly GPU, exposed by the removal of the half shroud cooler assembly. The inscriptions on the GPU aren’t very revealing but confirm the GPU is part of the Arise–GT family, model 10C0. Other codes on the chip don’t reveal anything to us. The model number is interesting though, because a couple weeks ago we saw some Geekbench 5 benchmark results for what was recognized as a Glenfly Arise 1020. It is hard to know if this is a different member of the Glenfly Arise discrete graphics cards family, or if the name difference is due to Geekbench sysinfo reporting quirks. Some Chinese tech sites today are talking as if the previous Geekbench info is from this exact same card.

To recap, the Geekbenched sample was tested in a Windows 10 system with a Zhaoxin 2.7GHz octacore CPU and 8GB of RAM. It was reported as coming with 24 compute units, a GPU clock of 608 MHz, and 2GB of VRAM. In OpenCL testing it scored 579, which is on a par with half-decade old smartphone GPUs. In comparison with a familiar PC GPU, like the classic Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, the Glenfly was about 60x slower in the Geekbench OpenCL tests.

The new Bilibili post about the Glenfly Arise-GT10C0 indicates it has a lot in common with the benchmarked sample. It looks a lot like the Glenfly reference design included in our previous article, as well as using a similar cooler, with the same outputs. The new post about this card says the GT10C0 has 2GB of VRAM, too.

If the hardware specs are underwhelming, it’s also worth pointing out that Glenfly hasn’t offered up a driver. Still, the Bilibili poster managed to run Windows 10 and an app by the name of ‘Haiguang C3138.’ In Windows 10, the tester found there were glitches in HDMI output. Moreover, when attempting to play back local video files, most of them didn’t show an image, says the Bilibili user.

The above-noted results are admittedly poor, but there may be potential for a lot better performance if a working Windows 10 driver is delivered. Capable software drivers are essential to graphics card performance, especially any kind of 3D acceleration. Just try and run your PC with the graphics driver uninstalled and see what happens.

We might see more of this Glenfly graphics card again shortly. The Chinese social media user says they will try and test it under the Tongxin/Galaxy Kirin operating system. Perhaps these subsequent tests will show improved potential.