Nvidia Turing release date, news and features

Nvidia Turing is the latest and greatest GPU architecture. Coming a full two years after Pascal, it was an excruciating wait, but it was worth it. The Turing-powered Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 are poised to be the best graphics cards for the games we play for the next few years.

We've gone hands on with the new heir apparent of the world's most powerful graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

Nvidia Turing will introduce real-time ray tracing and AI tech into consumer graphics cards for the first time. It’s a true paradigm shift as, the new GeForce RTX gaming cards are may completely change look of the best PC games.

Cut to the chase

What is it? Nvidia’s latest graphics card architecture
When is it out? September 20
What will it cost? $599 (£569, AU$899) - $10,000 (£7,830, AU$13,751)

Nvidia Turing release date

Both the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 are available for preorder now, and will get a hard launch on September 20, 2018. The GeForce RTX 2070 to follow at a later date sometime in October. There are also more professional-leaning Quadro GPUs that will be due to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2018 – which in Nvidia’s case means any time from October 29, 2018 to January 28 2019 – either way we expect to see them soon.

We’ve also seen some speculation that a mobile version of the RTX 2080 is on the way, and while previous speculation pointed to it launching by the end of 2018 – we have our money on it launching early on in 2019. Either way, if they’re nearly as powerful as Nvidia claims the desktop version is, we’re going to see some extremely powerful gaming laptops very soon.

Nvidia Turing price

For starters, The Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs are going to be extremely expensive, which should come as no surprise for high-end chips such as these.

Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000: $10,000 (£7,830, AU$13,751)
Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000: $6,300 (£4,935, AU$8,660)
Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000: $2,300 (£1,800, AU$3,160)

Of course, this are graphics cards meant for commercial work in the visual effects industry

For more consumer-focused cards, the prices seem to have risen, as well. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti seems to be taking the place of Nvidia’s past Titan cards, whereas the other cards seem to fall in line with the 10-series cards.

The prices for the announced cards is as follows:

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti: $1,199 (£1,099, AU$1,899)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080: $799 (£749, AU$1,199)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070: $599 (£569, AU$899)

It should be noted that the prices on the store are a bit higher than what Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang revealed at the Nvidia Geforce Celebration at Gamescom 2018 – at the time of writing. For instance, the 2080 Ti was initially revealed at $999, but that price isn’t currently reflected in the online store.

Nvidia Turing specs

The headline feature of Nvidia Turing is the inclusion of ray-tracing tech that can render more realistic visuals and lighting in real time without having to fall back on programming tricks. These specialized RTX cores essentially calculate how light and sound travel in a 3D environment at a rate of up to 10 GigaRays on the RTX 2080 Ti. These specialized cores will also supposedly allow Nvidia Turing-based graphics cards to process ray tracing up to 25 times faster than Pascal.

When these RTX Cores aren’t in use for processing ray tracing, they’ll essentially switch off, ceasing to draw any power.

In addition to these RTX cores, the Turing Architecture will also feature Tensor Cores, like the ones found in Volta. These specialized cores enable artificial intelligence and neural networking so that Turing cards get better at rendering over time – something previously exclusive to supercomputers.

With the ability to deliver 500 trillion Tensor operations a second, this technology accelerates deep learning training and inferencing. This will allow Nvidia to offer Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which will be a version of super sampling that won’t bring your computer to its knees. Even for games that don’t support this new DLSS tech, these AI-fueled cores should deliver traditional anti-aliasing much more efficiently – up to eight times.

As with Volta, Nvidia Turing is adopting GDDR6 memory – up to 11GB in the RTX 2080 Ti, which can clock in at up to 14Gbps, quite the leap over the Pascal-powered Nvidia Titan Xp that clocked in at 11.4Gbps.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is an absolute behemoth of a GPU. With 4,352 CUDA cores, 11GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 352-bit memory bus and 18 billion transistors, it’s going to be capable of 4K Ultra gaming at high refresh rates for years to come. It’s no wonder it comes with such a high price tag.

The more mainstream RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 are both still quite impressive, though, and will absolutely destroy the previous generation. The former will feature 2,944 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 memory and will clocked at 1.5GHz at its base frequency. The 2070, though will be a bit weaker, coming with 2,304 CUDA cores 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and clocked at 1,410Mhz base.

If you want to dive into deeper detail about how these cards will work we have you covered. Beyond that, we’ll be able to share more detailed performance numbers soon, so keep this page bookmarked, as we’ll update it just as soon as new information comes our way.

Thus far we only have partial specs on three Nvidia Quadro RTX cards:

Nvidia Turing Performance

Now that Nvidia has released a few more vague graphs, we have a better idea of how the new Nvidia cards are going to perform. The new Turing cards should be able to perform up to 2x faster than their Pascal equivalents when DLSS is enabled, and 1.5x better with it disabled. Thanks to the baked in AA improvements in the Tensor cores, you’re looking at about a 20-40% increase in games that don’t support DLSS.

A leaked 3DMark Time Spy benchmark also shows the Nvidia RTX 2080 outperforming the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti by 5% and the Nvidia GTX 1080 by 35%.

When it comes to ray tracing, we have a better idea of how Nvidia Turing is going to handle performance. Rather than rendering using pure ray tracing techniques, the new graphics cards are going to use a hybrid method – combining both traditional rasterization and ray tracing in order to produce playable frame rates.

The method by which this will be achieved is “Bounding Volume Hierarchy,” or BVH which will track large portions of the scene being rendered for whether or not a ray is being bounced. The RTX cores will then dig deeper into that large portion until it finds the polygon that’s getting hit by the light ray. This method should impact performance far less than tracking each ray live – but will still be quite demanding. In short, Nvidia Turing makes ray tracing easier because it simplifies the math.

This is on top of some of our own experience. We recently went hands on with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and were able to get some respectable 4K 60FPS gameplay out of the new card.

However, until we get these cards into our benchmarking lab, take the available performance metrics with a grain of salt.