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NVIDIA Quadro RTX, world's first ray tracing GPU, unveiled by man wearing an amazing leather jacket

Some people say that the jacket gives NVIDIA's CEO the magical ability to make AMD engineers cry.

Asif Khan

August 13, 2018 5:35 PM

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There have been a ton of NVIDIA GPU rumors spinning around the old internet tubes lately, but today at SIGGRAPH 2018 the company actually unveiled a real product. Sadly, it isn't the successor to the GTX 1080Ti that many gamers have been salivating over. NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at SIGGRAPH 2018 in another spiffy leather jacket to unveil the first ever ray tracing GPU, the Quadro RTX. NVIDIA had shown off a demo of RTX real-time ray tracing earlier this year at GDC 2018, but today the company finally has a product to push that technology forward.

Let's take a look at the NVIDIA Quadro RTX specs and price points:

NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs will be available for sale later this year with a fourth quarter launch expected by the company.  These are clearly GPUs for professionals, but NVIDIA is confident that this new Turing technology will help open up a $250 billion VFX industry to the tranformative world of real-time ray tracing. “Quadro RTX marks the launch of a new era for the global computer graphics industry,” said Bob Pette, VP of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. “Users can now enjoy powerful capabilities that weren’t expected to be available for at least five more years. Designers and artists can interact in real time with their complex designs and visual effects in ray-traced photo-realistic detail. And film studios and production houses can now realize increased throughput with their rendering workloads, leading to significant time and cost savings.”

Here is some more information about the technology inside NVIDIA's new line of Quadro RTX GPUs.

Quadro RTX Professional GPUs 
Quadro RTX GPUs are designed for the most demanding visual computing workloads, such as those used in film and video content creation; automotive and architectural design; and scientific visualization. They far surpass the previous generation with groundbreaking technologies, including:

• New RT Cores to enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions and global illumination.
• Turing Tensor Cores to accelerate deep neural network training and inference, which are critical to powering AI-enhanced rendering, products and services.
• New Turing Streaming Multiprocessor architecture, featuring up to 4,608 CUDA® cores, delivers up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second to accelerate complex simulation of real-world physics.
• Advanced programmable shading technologies to improve the performance of complex visual effects and graphics-intensive experiences.
• First implementation of ultra-fast Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 memory to support more complex designs, massive architectural datasets, 8K movie content and more.
• NVIDIA NVLink® to combine two GPUs with a high-speed link to scale memory capacity up to 96GB and drive higher performance with up to 100GB/s of data transfer.
• Hardware support for USB Type-C™ and VirtualLink™⁽¹⁾, a new open industry standard being developed to meet the power, display and bandwidth demands of next-generation VR headsets through a single USB-C™ connector.
• New and enhanced technologies to improve performance of VR applications, including Variable Rate Shading, Multi-View Rendering and VRWorks Audio.

Quadro RTX Server
The Quadro RTX Server defines a new standard for on-demand rendering in the datacenter, enabling easy configuration of on-demand render nodes for batch and interactive rendering.

It combines Quadro RTX GPUs with new Quadro Infinity software (available in the first quarter of 2019) to deliver a powerful and flexible architecture to meet the demands of creative professionals. Quadro Infinity will enable multiple users to access a single GPU through virtual workstations, dramatically increasing the density of the datacenter. End-users can also easily provision render nodes and workstations based on their specific needs.

With industry-leading content creation and render software pre-installed, the Quadro RTX Server provides a powerful and easy-to-deploy rendering solution that can scale from small installations to the largest data centers, at one quarter of the cost of CPU-only render farms.

The man in the fancy leather jacket definitely had something up his sleeve today, and we can only hope that gamers will get their wish at Gamescom 2018 later this month with a new successor to the GTX 1080 Ti GPU.

Asif Khan

CEO/EIC/EIEIO

Asif Khan is the CEO, EIC, and majority shareholder of Shacknews. He began his career in video game journalism as a freelancer in 2001 for Tendobox.com. Asif is a CPA and was formerly an investment adviser representative. After much success in his own personal investments, he retired from his day job in financial services and is currently focused on new private investments. His favorite PC game of all time is Duke Nukem 3D, and he is an unapologetic fan of most things Nintendo. Asif first frequented the Shack when it was sCary's Shugashack to find all things Quake. When he is not immersed in investments or gaming he is a purveyor of fine electronic music. Asif also has an irrational love of Cleveland sports.