“Turing is the biggest breakthrough in computer graphics since CUDA”

For the past two years, the graphics card market has been relatively stagnant. Nvidia introduced the Pascal architecture in May 2016 and has since released models based on it, the latest being the Geforce GTX 1070 Ti. Recently, however, the company presented the sequel to the architecture, which is named Turing and comes with a number of new features.

In conversations with investors, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang talks about the architecture Turing and describes it as a big step forward for computer graphics. According to Huang, Turing is the biggest breakthrough in the field since Nvidia introduced CUDA more than ten years ago. One of the biggest new features is support for real-time ray tracing, which is made possible by the hardware-accelerated technology RTX.

Turing is our most important innovation since the invention of the CUDA GPU, over a decade ago. The architecture includes new, dedicated ray-tracing processors or RT Cores, and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which together will make real-time ray-tracing possible for the first time.

Nvidia predicts that ray tracing will mean a big step forward for the graphics in games and the company says that they are collaborating with several developers to take gaming on PC to the next level with the technology. Among other things, the developer Epic Games has implemented support for it in the game engine Unreal Engine 4 and together with Microsoft, Nvidia has developed the graphics interface DirectX Raytracing.

The Turing architecture will also be the first to come out with GDDR6 memory from Samsung, which will be both faster and more energy efficient compared to GDDR5. To further highlight the investment in ray tracing the product name “Geforce RTX” is used instead of “GTX” for the new models. They are expected to be officially unveiled during Nvidia’s event on August 20.

Source: Seeking Alpha