The NVIDIA Turing GPU Architecture Deep Dive: Prelude to GeForce RTX
by Nate Oh on September 14, 2018 12:30 PM ESTClosing Thoughts
With a tagline like ‘Graphics Reinvented’, NVIDIA is certainly not straying from putting Turing in the most revolutionary limelight as possible. In that sense, NVIDIA is choosing to compare Turing to Pascal rather than Volta for every possible circumstance, especially for gaming. This decision is certainly not unfounded because for consumers, the Turing-based GeForce 20-series succeeds the Pascal-based GeForce 10-series. However, this can give the impression that because Turing is so different from Pascal, it warrants dissimilar comparisons like RTX-OPS metrics or gaming performance uplifts with DLSS or raytracing enabled.
The situation becomes a little more muddled because of several reasons:
- The pricing and availability of the RTX 20-series means that on a purely market segmentation level, it does not directly replace Pascal gaming products
- As gaming-focused cards, the major new features (RT cores, tensor cores, advanced shading) of the RTX 20-series do not operate out-of-the-box in games, are specific to select games, and
- The burden of communication is on the developers to educate consumers on the details of specific raytracing effects or use of AI-accelerated denoisers
These aren’t points that necessarily need to define Turing, except that NVIDIA has pushed the envelope by going all-in with marketing and branding. For their part, NVIDIA will have an continously updated list of games with RTX platform support.
On one hand, Turing seems like a possible solution to the gaming/compute architecture divergence. It seems less likely now that NVIDIA would backtrack into a more standard design for maximum rasterization performance, though obviously that remains to be seen with how the product fares. In any case, as most silicon design firms hvae leapfrogging design teams, the major decisions are likely not to move too far to the fixed function side, if only because the greatest strength of GPUs in compute is its programmability and versatility.
Looking back at ray tracing, it seems that even if it isn't immediately practical, there would still be a seeding effect to be gained via enthusiasts and certain gamers, which would work well with higher-profile AAA games. As we move into next week, it appears that the GeForce RTX 20-series is definitely one of the more nuanced graphics products, with both caveats and potential.
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Alistair - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link
Except for the GTX 780 was the worse nVidia release ever, at a terrible price. Nice try ignoring every other card in the last 10 years.markiz - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link
How can it be the same segment of the market, if the prices are, as you claim, double+?I mean, that claim makes no sense. It's not same segment. it's higher tier.
I mean, who is to say what kind of an advancement in GPU and games have people supposed to be getting?
Buy a 500$ card and max settings as far as they go and call it a day.
If you are
Ej24 - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link
The R&D for smaller manufacturing nodes hasn't scaled linearly. It's been almost exponential in terms of $/Sq.mm to develop each new node. That's why we need die shrinks to cram more transistors per square mm, and why some nodes were skipped because the economics didn't work out, like 20/22nm gpu's never existed. You're assuming that manufacturers have fixed costs that have never changed. The cost of a semiconductor fab, and R&D for new nodes has ballooned much much faster than inflation. That's why we've seen the number of fabs plummet with every new node. There used to be dozens of fabs in the 90nm days and before. Now it's looking like only 3 or 4 will be producing 7nm and below. It's just gotten too expensive for anyone to compete.milkod2001 - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link
All those ridiculous prices started when AMD have announced 7970 at $550 plus. NV had mid range card to compete with it: GTX 680 at the same price. And then NV Titan high end cards were introduced at $1000 plus. Since then we pay past high end prices for mid range cards.futrtrubl - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link
Just a bit on your math. You say $1 accounting for inflation of 2.7% over 18 years is now just less than $1.50. Maybe you are doing it as $1 * 18 * 1.027 to get that which is incorrect for inflation. It compounds, so it should be $1 * ( 1.027^18) which comes to ~$1.62. Likewise at 5% over 18 years it becomes $2.41.Da W - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link
Since when does inflation work in the semiconductor industry?Holliday75 - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link
I was wondering the same thing. Smaller, faster, cheaper. For some reason here its the opposite....for 2 out of 3.Yojimbo - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link
"You must literally live under a rock while also being absurdly naive.It's never been this way in the 20 years that i've been following GPUs. These new RTX GPUs are ridiculously expensive, way more than ever, and the prices will not be changing much at all when there's literally zero competition. The GPU space right now is worse than it's ever been before in history."
No, if you go back and look at historical GPU prices, adjusted for inflation, there have been other times that newly released graphics cards were either as expensive or more expensive. The 700 series is the most recent example of cards that were as expensive as the 20 series is.
eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link
No.https://i.imgur.com/ZZnTS5V.png
This chart was made last year based on 2017 dollar value, but it still applies. 20 series cards have the highest launch prices in the past 18 years by a large margin.
eddman - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link
There is one card that surpasses that, 8800 Ultra. It was nothing more than a slightly OCed 8800 GTX. Nvidia simply released it to extract as much money as possible, and that was made possible because of lack of proper competition from ATI/AMD in that time period.