Nvidia announced its first graphics chips that take advantage of its new Turing-based computer graphics architecture, the Quadro RTX series. The new chips for workstations enable real-time ray tracing, a rendering technique that traces the paths of rays of light to create highly realistic animations that can power games and other interactive animations.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, unveiled the Quadro chips and the Turing architecture in a speech at the Siggraph computer graphics event in Vancouver, Canada. Nvidia claims it will revolutionize the work of 50 million designers, engineers, and artists by enabling them to render photorealistic scenes in real-time.
“This is the single greatest leap we have ever made in a single generation,” Huang said in the speech.
Nvidia has three new chips in the Quadro family: Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000, and Quadro RTX 5000. All can do hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI, advanced shading, and simulation processing. Quadro RTX Server is a reference architecture for highly configurable, on-demand rendering and virtual workstation solutions from the datacenter.
“Quadro RTX marks the launch of a new era for the global computer graphics industry,” said Bob Pette, vice president of professional visualization at Nvidia, in a statement. “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 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.”
Nvidia said 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.
The chips have RT Cores to enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, and refractions. They also have Turing Tensor Cores to accelerate deep neural network training and inference, which are critical to powering AI-enhanced rendering, products, and services.
Above: Porsche concept car
And they feature a new Turing Streaming Multiprocessor architecture, featuring up to 4,608 CUDA cores. The high-end Quadro chip can deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second to accelerate complex simulation of real-world physics.
The chips feature the first implementation of ultra-fast Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 memory to support more complex designs, massive architectural datasets, 8K movie content, and more.
Nvidia NVLik can connect 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.
“AI and real-time ray tracing are transforming the way designers and artists work,” said Amy Bunszel, senior vice president of design and creation products at Autodesk, in a statement. “Autodesk and Nvidia are working together to deliver these advancements to the market, and we look forward to the new tools and capabilities Quadro RTX will deliver to our customers.”
Dell, HP Enterprise, HP, and Lenovo expressed support for Nvidia’s new Quadro chips. The Quadro RTX 8000 with 48GB of memory costs $10,000. The Quadro RTX 6000 with 24GB is $6,300, and the Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB memory is $2,300. The chips will be available in the fourth quarter.
