Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture and First Graphics Cards!

Meet the new family Painting RTX.

The long-awaited Nvidia Turing GPU architecture for next-gen graphics cards is finally officially unveiled and offers more than we could have hoped for.

Turing includes a number of new features and technologies, including new RT cores capable of real-time ray tracing. These specialized kernels essentially calculate how light and sound travels through a 3D environment at a rate of 10 GigaRays.

This may sound like a fictional unit of performance measurement, but Nvidia claims that Turing can handle real-time ray tracing 25 times faster than the previous Pascal architecture. The manufacturer also notes that GPU nodes can outperform CPU nodes by up to 30x when rendering and rendering effects.

Aside from this specialized ray tracing technology, Nvidia has also integrated the Tensor Cores we saw with Volta to bring artificial intelligence to this GPU architecture. These cores will basically do up to 500 trillion tensor operations per second to speed up learning and inference.

AI, in turn, will be able to leverage new rendering techniques, including deep learning anti-aliasing, which promises high-quality image rendering with de-noise, resolution scaling and secondary video sampling.

| A BOLD NEW WORLD OF GRAPHICS

Nvidia Turing combines native RT and Tensor Cores to offer a new form of hybrid rendering that includes both simulation and advanced rasterization. Team Green said the technology will be the industry’s first in the visual effects industry to create cinematic-quality interactive experiences.

To that end, Nvidia also unveiled three new Quadro RTX graphics cards with up to 48GB GDDR6 memory, 4608 CUDA cores and 576 Tensor cores, all based on the Turing architecture.

Even though Nvidia doesn’t mention Turing-based GeForce graphics cards, this is the clearest example of what they might end up looking like. We’re pretty sure we’ll see an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 or an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1180 by the end of the month.