Nvidia reveals new GPU architecture and teases a new line of gaming GPUs
The bank accounts of super dedicated, hardcore PC gamers everywhere just shivered - Nvidia has unveiled its new 'Turing' GPU architecture.
PC gamers won't have to worry about shelling out just yet, since the first glimpse at Turing-powered GPUs provided yesterday were all aimed at the professional market - but that means we're just a very small step away from new consumer-grade products from Nvidia, something that's been heavily featured on the rumor circuit for a good few months now.
The teaser video above also debuted alongside the announcements, and contains glimpses of a new cooler design that as far as we know isn't featured on any current Nvidia GPU hardware - something one should consider to be pretty telling.
The video is packed with other hints, all of which point to Cologne in Germany - the location of Gamescom and Nvidia's 'GeForce Gaming Celebration' event - both of which take place next week. Rumours have suggested that the new flagship GPU for gaming might be called the RTX2080, and further clues in the video (look at the Discord and Steam usernames shown closely!) seem to back that up.
Yesterday saw Nvidia take to the stage at the SIGGRAPH conference, however. That event is all about professional, enterprise use of graphics technology, and the GPUs debuted there are some serious, mind-melting stuff.
Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang revealed three such products - the RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000. The new Turing-based Quadro RTX tech that powers these three is being sold as the "world's first ray-tracing GPU", and Nvidia believe it to be the biggest individual jump since the introduction of CUDA back in 2006.
These definitely aren't gaming products, however - the RTX 8000 will cost $10,000 later this year, for instance. At the same time, these cards are the first designed to deliver the high-end real time ray-tracing demos that earlier this year I said looked like a proper glimpse into the future - so it's exciting to see them hitting market in any form.
It'll be more exciting still to see just what Nvidia manages to accomplish with their gaming-focused, non-enterprise cards. We'll find out next week, and VG247 will be there to report on it all - so stick with us.