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, m ...

(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 ...

. The architecture was first introduced in August 2018 at

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

2018 in the workstation-oriented

Quadro RTX Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine ...

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: Associ ...

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 machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

processors ("Tensor cores") and dedicated ray tracing processors (“RT cores”). Turing leverages DXR,

OptiX Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a ray tracing API that was first developed around 2009. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only av ...

, and

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...

for access to ray-tracing. In February 2019, Nvidia released the

GeForce 16 series The GeForce 16 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, based on the Turing microarchitecture, announced in February 2019. The 16 series, commercialized within the same timeframe as the 20 series, aims to cover the ...

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' ...

's 12 nm

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 Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are pr ...

. 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 ...

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, acc ...

, 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, includin ...

Details

The Turing microarchitecture combines multiple types of specialized

processor core A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

, 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 quadtrees 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 In computer graphics, rasterisation (British English) or rasterization (American English) is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (a series of pixels, dots or lines, whic ...

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 occluded ...

, 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 Deep learning super sampling (DLSS) is a family of real-time deep learning image enhancement and upscaling technologies developed by Nvidia that are exclusive to its RTX line of graphics cards, and available in a number of video games. The goal o ...

(DLSS) * Memory controller with GDDR6/

HBM2 High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a high-speed computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerato ...

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 NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central hub. The protocol was f ...

Bridge with

VRAM Video random access memory (VRAM) is dedicated computer memory used to store the pixels and other graphics data as a framebuffer to be rendered on a computer monitor. This is often different technology than other computer memory, to facilitate b ...

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 Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be ...

, 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 Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

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 technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

's DXR,

, as well using

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, 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 hardwa ...

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 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 The GeForce 20 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Serving as the successor to the GeForce 10 series, the line started shipping on September 20, 2018, and after several editions, on July 2, 2019, the GeForce R ...

** 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 was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine l ...

** 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