Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang today unveiled the company’s long-waited next-generation graphic processing unit (GPU) cards for games, GeForce RTX.
Huang announced three GeForce RTX models at Gamescom 2018 in Germany, touting them as “the biggest leap in computer graphic history.” The RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti have up to 78 tera ray tracing operations and six times the performance of previous-generation graphics cards (GeForce 1080 Ti). The units are also quiet, producing only 1/5 the sound of predecessor GeForce 1080 Ti at maximum overclock.
The GeForce RTX can run ray tracing at up to 10 GigaRays/second, with a 11 GB GDDR6, 14 Gbps Memory Speed, and 616 GB/s Memory Bandwidth. It is listed at US$599 on Nvidia’s website.
GeForce RTX uses the state-of-the-art real-time ray tracing technology to provide realistic lighting by simulating the real-world physical behavior of light. With ray tracing technology, GeForce RTX can enable real-time rendering effects such as global illumination, reflections, area lights, and so on.
Ray tracing has long been regarded as a far-fetched technology due the limited compute capacity of previous graphic cards. But things are quickly changing. At SIGGRAPH 2018 last week Nvidia introduced Turing, an eighth-generation GPU architecture that introduced ray tracing and AI capability to real-time graphics and games. Nvidia says it spent 10 years developing Turing, which builds on the foundation of Pascal architecture and adds both a Tensor Core with AI training and inferencing capabilities, and an RT Core with ray tracing.
With 4,608 CUDA cores, the RTX series of chips deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second to accelerate complex simulations of real-world physics.
The new GeForce RTX series have the capability to take the visual experience of video games to the next level with better reflections, true-to-life dynamic lighting, realistic soft shadows, and so on — the little things that gamers recognize and appreciate. Over 20 games powered by GeForce RTX, including Battlefield V, Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, will be available for beta users in September.
Nvidia also announced a new Neural Graphics Framework platform for image processing that integrates graphics and deep learning. Nvidia has achieved multiple milestones in computer vision thanks to its constant R&D efforts with AI algorithms, including image segmentation, hair colorization, image transfer from low to high resolution, and so on.
GeForce RTX is available for pre-order starting today, and will be shipped on September 20.
Journalist: Tony Peng | Editor: Michael Sarazen
This graphics card is a beast. There is so much potential for future game development What great time to be alive!