Nvidia announces Turing architecture for gpu's Quadro RTX8000, 6000, 5000

Jensen Huang has let the cat out of the bag and has made a number of announcements over at SIGGRAPH, one of them. Turing is the new architecture for next-gen GPUs. In addition, the company has announced a number of graphics cards, not intended for the consumer market.

For the SIGGRAPH presentations, Nvidia focused mainly on ray tracing CAPABILITIES, and Turing gpu's will have specialized RT cores on board to enable ray tracing with minimal delay. Together with a new generation of Tensor cores a Turing gpu would offer performance increases, six time that of the previous Pascal generation. Nvidia plans to develop Turing with the goal of enabling real-time raytracing effects. This was expected after Microsoft added DXR into DirectX 12 and Nvidia's implementation of RTX at GDC 2018. Thus far, only Volta has been able to accelerate this in hardware. Turing can do that too - via dedicated circuits that you know as the Volta tensor cores for AI. For Turing NVIDIA adds RT cores, ray tracing cores  - next to the classic CUDA cores, of course.

Turing GPUs make use of, or better yet, can make use of gddr6 memory at a maximum speed of of 14Gbit/s, and that is available from Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Nvidia announced four professional models, the Quadro RTX8000, 6000, 5000 and RTX Server. The flagship is the RTX8000 has 4608 shader-cores and 576 Tensor cores at a die size of 754 square millimeters. The new GPUs will be released this autumn.

“Turing is NVIDIA’s most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, speaking at the start of the annual SIGGRAPH conference. “Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences. The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.”

Even though there is no information yet about the gaming graphics cards, it was already mentioned that the new GeForce models will also be based on Turing. Nvidia is expected to announce the consumer versions of the new GPUs next week at the GamesCom gaming fair in Cologne Germany.