Nvidia Turing Details: Specs, Price, DLSS and RTX Games - IGN Africa

Turing is the name of Nvidia’s latest generation of graphics cards, and what a lineup it is. Since Turing’s debut in August 2018, Nvidia has announced a total of 10 GPUs. And rather than just introducing newer, faster GeForce GTX graphics cards, Nvidia introduced new GPUs with ray tracing and deep learning-focused hardware with a completely new line of RTX cards.

Most recently, Nvidia released upgraded versions of its original RTX graphics cards with its new Super GPUs (yes, that’s really what they’re named) and a few more budget-minded GTX cards. Whether you’re looking for a graphics card that’ll finally be able to make full use of your 4K gaming monitor or 4K gaming TV, or you're jumping up to 1440p, Nvidia Turing has something for everyone, so let’s get into Nvidia’s current lineup of GPUs.

Nvidia Turing Release Date

Nvidia Turing possibly had the longest windup to its initial reveal at Gamescom 2018. Prior to that date, the entire PC gaming world was chomping at the bit for new graphics cards while the Bitcoin craze made GPUs a rare and expensive commodity, a period lasting between the last quarter of 2017 until the about the Spring of 2018.

Turing debuted with a trio of cards on August 20, 2018: the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, GeForce RTX 2080, and GeForce RTX 2070. Although the three cards were announced together, they didn’t appear on shelves at the same time. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 released on schedule on September 20, 2018, but the RTX 2080 Ti came a week later than planned on September 27, 2018. Meanwhile, the RTX 2070 didn’t release until October 17, 2018.

The next Turing graphics card wouldn’t be announced until CES 2019. The RTX 2060—and RTX-powered gaming laptops—were announced on January 7, 2019, and subsequently released on January 15, 2019.

Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OC, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti — The Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OC

Following sluggish sales on RTX cards, a continued lack of ray-traced games, and plenty of blowback from the PC gaming community, Nvidia announced its three Turing GTX cards and released the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti on February 22, 2019. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 followed shortly after on March 14, 2019. Lastly, the GeForce GTX 1650 arrived on April 23, 2019, along with the first bundle of Turing GTX-powered gaming laptops.

Up until now, this has all been a slightly more frequent release cadence for Nvidia, but then Team Green announced Super GPUs on July 2, 2019, as a completely new addition for its lineup. The RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2060 Super both released on the same day of their announcement, and the RTX 2080 Super arrived a few weeks later on July 23, 2019.

Nvidia Turing Price

Overall with Turing, the price of Nvidia graphics cards has definitely increased since Pascal. What would have bought you an Nvidia GTX 1080 in the past will now buy you an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super, a GTX 1070 Ti for an RTX 2060 Super, and so on.

Essentially, Nvidia has set the goalposts forward with its pricing scheme on its RTX graphics cards. That said, the value you can squeeze out of a Turing GTX graphics card has never been better.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the launch pricing on all the Nvidia Turing GPUs:

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti: $1,199 (about R16500.00)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super: $699 (about R9700.00)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080: $699 (about R9700.00)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super: $499 (about R7000.00)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070: $499 (about R7000.00)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super: $399 (about R5550.00)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060: $349 (about R4850.00)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti: $279 (about R3800.00)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660: $219 (about R3050.00)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650: $149 (about R2075.00)

Nvidia Turing Specs

With the introduction of Turing, Nvidia really did introduce a completely new GPU architecture. Not only did Turing make the jump from Pascal 14nm process to a 12nm one, but it also introduced a much larger die that added ray tracing and Tensor cores to the mix.

Ray tracing cores or RT cores are a specialized part of the GPU designed to essentially trace the rays of in-game light and calculate how they’re being reflected, refracted, and absorbed to produce more realistic graphics. Unlike most ray tracing used in computer graphics; RT cores are one of the few dedicated hardware solutions that do this work in real-time.

For now, RT cores remain to be an exclusive feature for Nvidia’s Turing RTX cards. However, less than a half year after the introduction Turing, Nvidia admitted ray tracing cores aren’t necessary to enable RTX mode. The GPU maker released a driver on April 11, 2019, allowing GTX graphics cards both new and old (down to the Nvidia GTX 1060) to take advantage of ray tracing.

Tensor cores, on the other hand, are designed for deep learning processes. Its most commonly used comes tied with Nvidia’s own Deep Learning Super-Sampling, which applies a specialized form of anti-aliasing that produces sharper images with higher framerates than other forms of AA can produce.

One other big component that Nvidia Turing introduced was GDDR6 memory, which can achieve speeds of up to (so far) 15.5Gbps. Comparatively, the maximum stock memory speed achieved on GDDR5 memory was 11.4GBps. Unfortunately, not all Turing graphics card feature GDDR6 memory as the GTX 1660 and GTX 1650 still only get GDDR5 memory.

New types of cores and video memory aside, the new Turing GPU itself is also fairly different from the Pascal GPU. For Turing, Nvidia streamlined its architecture by placing only a single warp scheduler and dispatch unit into each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM)—otherwise known as the smallest building blocks of a GPU.

This is also where Tensor Cores come into integrate itself directly with the Turing architecture to denoise images—or essentially fill in the blocks missing in rendered images. RT Cores, on the other hand, are almost completely divorced from the rest of the GPU’s main image processing block. In fact, these specialized RT Cores are only used to power Nvidia’s RTX technology or compute sound ray tracing. Otherwise, RT Cores remain completely inert, drawing zero power when not in use.

The new 16-series GTX gain all the streamlined improvements of Turing’s architecture, but not the specialized RT or Tensor Cores. In place of Tensor cores, Turing-based GTX cards have Floating Point 16 cores that handle integer heavy workloads.

But when it comes to real-time ray tracing, the only thing the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, and 1650 have to handle RTX is their own brute graphical strength—which has worked out surprisingly well so far.

Nvidia Turing RTX Games

Despite real-time ray tracing being Nvidia Turing RTX’s signature feature, the list of games that actually take advantage of the technology is still fairly short. That said, the list has been growing and will likely explode when the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett hit the market, which are said to support ray tracing and may release next year.

Here are the games we know that have, or will, support RTX, when they enabled their respective ray tracing features, and the type of ray tracing you can expect from them (which we've denoted as “RTX Effects” whenever the developer or Nvidia hasn’t specified what the “effects” exactly are):

Assetto Corsa (Sept 2018): RTX Reflections
Battlefield V (Nov 2018): RTX Reflections
JX3 (Nov 2018): “RTX Effects”
Metro Exodus (Feb 2019): RTX Global Illumination
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (March 2019): RTX Procedural Lighting and Shadows
Control (Aug 2019): RTX Reflections, Transparent Reflections, Diffuse Global Illumination, and Contact Shadows
Stay in the Light (June 2019): RTX Shadows and Lighting
Quake II RTX (June 2019): RTX Global Illumination
Wolfenstein: Youngblood (July 2019): “RTX Effects”
Control (Aug 2019): RTX Reflections, Transparent Reflections, Diffuse Global Illumination, and Contact Shadows
Mechwarrior V: Mercenaries (Sept 2019): RTX Reflections
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Oct 2019): “RTX Effects”
Atomic Heart (Q4 2019): RTX Ambient Occlusion, Reflections, and Shadows
Enlisted (TBD 2019): RTX Global Illumination
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 (Mar 2020): “RTX Effects”
CyberPunk 2077 (Apr 2020): “RTX Effects”
Watch Dogs: Legion (Mar 2020): “RTX Effects”
Justice (TBD): RTX Reflections and Shadows
Dragon Hound (TBD): “RTX Effects”

Nvidia Turing DLSS Games

While Nvidia’s RTX implementation has been varied with what types of ray tracing users can expect, DLSS has been much cleaner cut.

For the most part, every game on this list below launched with or will receive the ability to utilize Team Green’s AI-based anti-aliasing technology on these following dates (unfortunately for many, DLSS support has been only announced):