A new discrete gaming GPU evidently supports Windows on ARM for the first time — and it's not from NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel

It's no secret that China's GPU manufacturers are doing everything possible to catch up to the heavy global names, NVIDIA and AMD, in both the AI and consumer markets.

On the side of consumer gaming hardware, it appears that a new discrete GPU from the Chinese card maker Lisuan is the first to offer compatibility with Windows on ARM.

That's an exciting revelation for PC gamers. Up until now, Windows on ARM hasn't had an avenue for pairing an ARM64 chip with a discrete AMD or NVIDIA GPU. Even Intel and its stellar Arc GPUs are out of the question. Why? The big GPU manufacturers simply haven't bothered creating proper drivers for the ARM-based Windows package.

This incompatibility essentially means that when you buy a Windows PC running Windows on ARM — a market currently completely dominated by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips — you're stuck with integrated graphics. Lisuan Technology, a company founded in 2021 and headquartered in Shanghai, evidently wants to change that.

Lisuan debuted its 7G106 card in July 2025 as China's first 6nm GPU designed for gaming. Featuring 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, DirectX 12 support, and a slick blower design, it made some waves in the PC gaming world before the company seemingly put its head down to work on its product.

We now have an update in the form of a 26-second video posted on the Chinese platform bilibili. The video shows the Lisuan 7G106 GPU running on a system with an ARM-based CPU (a Chinese 12-core CP8180 v9 ARM chip from 2024), being benchmarked using 3DMark's Steel Nomad test in Windows on ARM.

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A look at the test system's components through the Windows 11 Task Manager.

A look at the DirectX display panel on the Windows on ARM test system.

During the demonstration, a DirectX 12 window is shown in the OS, and we can clearly see in the Windows Task Manager that the hardware all checks out. If Lisuan indeed has created an ARM64 driver compatible with its GPU, this could be a major step forward for gaming on ARM-based systems, at least within the Chinese GPU ecosystem.

In the meantime, Qualcomm has been anything but idle. The company announced a chip refresh in the form of Snapdragon X2 in September 2025, promising a significant leap forward for overall performance in ARM-based Windows 11 PCs.

Beyond performance improvements and better game compatibility, Qualcomm promises new optimizations available through the Snapdragon Control Panel and new kernel-level anti-cheat compatibility for competitive titles. And yet, there's still no word of compatibility with NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel discrete GPUs.

(via Videocardz, ITHome)

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