Turing is the codename for a

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mo ...

(GPU) microarchitecture developed by

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. It is named after the prominent mathematician and computer scientist

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical c ...

. The architecture was first introduced in August 2018 at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the workstation-oriented Quadro RTX cards, and one week later at

Gamescom Gamescom (stylized as gamescom) is a trade fair for video games held annually at the Koelnmesse in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Since 2018, it has been organised by ''game – Verband der deutschen Games-Branche'' (English: Assoc ...

in consumer GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards. Building on the preliminary work of its HPC-exclusive predecessor, the Turing architecture introduces the first consumer products capable of real-time ray tracing, a longstanding goal of the computer graphics industry. Key elements include dedicated

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

processors ("Tensor cores") and dedicated ray tracing processors (“RT cores”). Turing leverages DXR, OptiX, and Vulkan for access to ray-tracing. In February 2019, Nvidia released the GeForce 16 series of GPUs, which utilizes the new Turing design but lacks the RT and Tensor cores. Turing is manufactured using

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...

12 nm 1 (one, unit, unity) is a number representing a single or the only entity. 1 is also a numerical digit and represents a single unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of ''unit length'' is a line segment of length 1. I ...

FinFET A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, ...

semiconductor fabrication process. The high-end TU102 GPU includes 18.6billion

transistors upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...

fabricated using this process. Turing also uses GDDR6 memory from

Samsung Electronics Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of the Samsung chaebol, a ...

, and previously

Micron Technology Micron Technology, Inc. is an American producer of computer memory and computer data storage including dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. It is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Its consumer products, including ...

Details

The Turing microarchitecture combines multiple types of specialized processor core, and enables an implementation of limited real-time ray tracing. This is accelerated by the use of new RT (ray-tracing) cores, which are designed to process

quadtree A quadtree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly four children. Quadtrees are the two-dimensional analog of octrees and are most often used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into four ...

s and spherical hierarchies, and speed up collision tests with individual triangles. Features in Turing: *

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...

cores (SM, Streaming Multiprocessor) ** Compute Capability 7.5 ** traditional rasterized shaders and compute ** concurrent execution of integer and floating point operations (inherited from Volta) * Ray-tracing (RT) cores **

bounding volume hierarchy A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects, that form the leaf nodes of the tree, are wrapped in bounding volumes. These nodes are then grouped as small sets and enclosed within larg ...

acceleration ** shadows,

ambient occlusion In 3D computer graphics, modeling, and animation, ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. For example, the interior of a tube is typically more occlude ...

, lighting, reflections * Tensor (AI) cores ** artificial intelligence ** large

matrix Matrix most commonly refers to: * ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise ** '' The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film ** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchi ...

operations ** Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) * Memory controller with GDDR6/ HBM2 support *

DisplayPort DisplayPort (DP) is a digital display interface developed by a consortium of PC and chip manufacturers and standardized by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). It is primarily used to connect a video source to a display device su ...

1.4a with Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2 * PureVideo Feature Set J hardware video decoding * GPU Boost 4 * NVLink Bridge with VRAM stacking pooling memory from multiple cards * VirtualLink VR * NVENC hardware encoding The GDDR6 memory is produced by

for the Quadro RTX series. The RTX 20 series initially launched with

Micron The micrometre ( international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer ( American spelling), also commonly known as a micron, is a unit of length in the International System of Un ...

memory chips, before switching to Samsung chips by November 2018.

Rasterization

Nvidia reported rasterization (CUDA) performance gains for existing titles of approximately 30–50% over the previous generation.

Ray-tracing

The ray-tracing performed by the RT cores can be used to produce reflections, refractions and shadows, replacing traditional raster techniques such as cube maps and

depth map In 3D computer graphics and computer vision, a depth map is an image or image channel that contains information relating to the distance of the surfaces of scene objects from a viewpoint. The term is related (and may be analogous) to ''depth ...

s. Instead of replacing rasterization entirely, however, the information gathered from ray-tracing can be used to augment the shading with information that is much more photo-realistic, especially in regards to off-camera action. Nvidia said the ray-tracing performance increased about 8 times over the previous consumer architecture, Pascal.

Tensor cores

Generation of the final image is further accelerated by the Tensor cores, which are used to fill in the blanks in a partially rendered image, a technique known as de-noising. The Tensor cores perform the result of deep learning to codify how to, for example, increase the resolution of images generated by a specific application or game. In the Tensor cores' primary usage, a problem to be solved is analyzed on a supercomputer, which is taught by example what results are desired, and the supercomputer determines a method to use to achieve those results, which is then done with the consumer's Tensor cores. These methods are delivered via driver updates to consumers. The supercomputer uses a large number of Tensor cores itself.

Chips

* TU102 * TU104 * TU106 * TU116 * TU117

Development

Turing's development platform is called RTX. RTX ray-tracing features can be accessed using

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

's DXR, OptiX, as well using Vulkan extensions (the last one being also available on Linux drivers). It includes access to AI-accelerated features through NGX. The Mesh Shader, Shading Rate Image functionalities are accessible using

DX12 DX1 may refer to: * Yamaha DX1, an FM synthesizer * (7202) 1995 DX1, a main-belt minor planet * ''Deus Ex'' (video game), a 2000 action role-playing video game See also * DX (disambiguation) DX may refer to: In arts and entertainment * ''D ...

, Vulkan and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve ha ...

extensions on Windows and Linux platforms. Windows 10 October 2018 update includes the public release of DirectX Raytracing.

Products using Turing

* GeForce MX series ** GeForce MX450 (Mobile) ** GeForce MX550 (Mobile) * GeForce 16 series ** GeForce GTX 1630 ** GeForce GTX 1650 (Mobile) ** GeForce GTX 1650 ** GeForce GTX 1650 Super ** GeForce GTX 1650 Ti (Mobile) ** GeForce GTX 1660 ** GeForce GTX 1660 Super ** GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (Mobile) ** GeForce GTX 1660 Ti * GeForce 20 series ** GeForce RTX 2060 (Mobile) ** GeForce RTX 2060 ** GeForce RTX 2060 Super ** GeForce RTX 2070 (Mobile) ** GeForce RTX 2070 ** GeForce RTX 2070 Super (Mobile) ** GeForce RTX 2070 Super ** GeForce RTX 2080 (Mobile) ** GeForce RTX 2080 ** GeForce RTX 2080 Super (Mobile) ** GeForce RTX 2080 Super ** GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ** Titan RTX * Nvidia Quadro ** Quadro RTX 3000 (Mobile) ** Quadro RTX 4000 (Mobile) ** Quadro RTX 4000 ** Quadro RTX 5000 (Mobile) ** Quadro RTX 5000 ** Quadro RTX 6000 (Mobile) ** Quadro RTX 6000 ** Quadro RTX 8000 ** Quadro RTX T400 ** Quadro RTX T400 4GB ** Quadro RTX T600 ** Quadro RTX T1000 ** Quadro RTX T1000 8GB *

Nvidia Tesla Nvidia Tesla was the name of Nvidia's line of products targeted at stream processing or general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began using GPUs from the G80 ser ...

** Tesla T4

References

External links

Nvidia Turing GPU Architecture WhitepaperNvidia page about TuringNvidia blog about raytracing vs. rasterizationNVIDIA Turing Architecture In-DepthMicrosoft developer blog on DirectX Raytracing
{{Alan Turing Nvidia microarchitectures Nvidia Turing Computer-related introductions in 2018