Nvidia officially announces Turing architecture, launches new RTX Quadro series

Turing is the next step for Nvidia and will excel at ray tracing using its Tensor cores and RT core. (Source: Anandtech)

On August 13 at Siggraph Nvidia announced its new Turing based RTX Quadro GPUs, designed to process real time ray tracing. The full Turing GPU is the second biggest in the world (the first being Volta) and it is the world's first GPU with ray tracing functionality built in. The new RTX Quadro lineup will be arriving in Q4 or sooner.

Matthew Connatser, Published 08/14/2018

It seems the rumors are true; well, mostly. During its Siggraph presentation, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang officially announced the Turing architecture and the RTX Quadro series based on Turing (not an RTX Titan as was rumored). The new Turing architecture is focused on real time ray tracing using Nvidia's RTX and RT core technology. According to Nvidia, this is the biggest leap in performance since CUDA was introduced in 2006 and that this innovation "reinvents computer graphics."

Turing is comprised in 3 sections: Tensor cores, CUDA cores, and finally the new RT core. Volta had Tensor and CUDA, but this RT core section is new. With the Tensor cores and RT core, Nvidia says Turing makes real time ray tracing possible for the first time. Nvidia demonstrated its real time ray tracing technology multiple times during the conference, showing how in the Star Wars demo that one Turing GPU was equivalent to 4 Volta GPUs. Although Nvidia has hyped up Turing quite a bit, it may not be unwarranted.

Turing also features an update to SMs, which is a collection of CUDA cores, similar to how an AMD CU is a collection of streaming processors (or cores). SMs and CUDA cores are what matter for general applications like gaming; Tensor cores and the RT core will be used for AI and ray tracing. Nvidia might also be making a new leap in gaming graphics cards as well, perhaps on the scale of Fermi to Kepler or Kepler to Maxwell, both of which were very large leaps in performance despite not always using a different process node.

Finally, Nvidia released a teaser for their new gaming GPUs, and it almost certainly confirms the AdoredTV leak on Turing when it comes to the gaming GPUs. Several references to "80", "RTX", "20", and "2080" are contained within this teaser. So far, according to the rumor, we should expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 2080 (which is exactly what the company is teasing), which should have at least a cut down version of the RT core, for about US$500-700. Then, the RTX 2070 will launch a month later in September, and the GTX 2060 and 2050 will launch in November. Of course, this is all rumors, but when one half is true, the other half might be true as well.