Nvidia's Turing GPU, Quadro RTX And GeForce RTX: 5 Things PC Gamers Need To Know

Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs are built on a revolutionary Turing GPU with dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing. Here’s what they herald for PC gamers and next-gen GeForce graphics cards.

- Brad Chacos

It looks like the fearsome GPU inside Nvidia’s Titan V (go.pcworld.com/ttnv) will never make it to gamers after all. Poor Volta. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed at Siggraph 2018 in mid-August (go. pcworld.com/rytr) the Quadro RTX 8000, 6000, and 5000 graphics processors, powered by an all-new and long-rumored “Turing” graphics architecture. Friends, Turing looks ferocious—and it’s brimming with portent about Nvidia’s nextgen GeForce graphics cards.

The Quadro RTX GPUs are overflowing with CUDA cores, AI-boosting tensor cores, and an all-new technology dubbed “RT cores” designed to make Nvidia’s new graphics architecture up to 25x more efficient at cutting-edge real-time ray-tracing operations (go.pcworld.com/dxry). “Turing is Nvidia’s most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade,” Huang said. “The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.”

We don’t normally cover data center and workstation graphics here at PCWorld, but with Nvidia teasing a GeForce event with “spectacular surprises” (go.pcworld.com/ nwgc) at Gamescom in a mere week’s time, let’s examine what the announcement of these Quadro RTX GPUs potentially mean for PC gamers and the consumer GeForce lineup, including the rumored GTX 2080. Or should I say RTX 2080, as a GeForce tweet heavily hints?

1. TURING GPUS GET OFFICIAL

For months, rumors have been swirling about potential next-gen GeForce GTX 1180 or 2080 graphics cards, but each leak featured a different name for the would-be GPUs. Volta? Ampere? Turing? What would Nvidia’s new architecture be called?