NVIDIA fficially debuted its brand new ray tracing Turing architecture yesterday and in less than a week we’re going to welcome a new family of GeForce RTX gaming graphics cards at Gamescom.
Thanks to yesterday’s launch of the Quadro RTX family based on the company’s next generation 12nm Turing microarchitecture we have a LOT of new information about the company’s upcoming gaming family of GeForce graphics cards.
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Let’s start off with the most important pieces of leaked information that yesterday’s announcement has confirmed. The first is that the company’s next generation microarchitecture is indeed called Turing, will take on a new RTX branding instead of the current GTX branding and thanks to some teases by the company we also now know that the new gaming family will in fact be the GeForce 20 series, rather than the 11 series.
Moving on to the most important tidbits from yesterday’s announcements we have actual specs for the company’s brand new GT102 and GT104 GPUs, which are expected to power the company’s next generation Titan GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards respectively. So let’s dig into the figures.
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Let’s begin with the confirmed pieces of information regarding GT104. Based on the specifications announced for the Quadro RTX 5000 yesterday, NVIDIA’s new sweet-spot Turing chip features 4 GPCs, each housing 24 SMs and 768 CUDA cores. This means that a Turing GPC is two SMs larger than a Pascal GPC. GT104 also features 384 TENSOR cores and a 256bit GDDR6 memory interface, the latter of part was widely expected.
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Based on the compute figures divulged by NVIDIA yesterday for GT104’s bigger brother, GT102, a GTX 2080 based on GT104 could realistically run at boost clocks in excess of 2GHz. This would make it the first ever reference designed graphics card to run at 2GHz out of the box.
Now, assuming that NVIDIA’s upcoming RTX 2080 will feature a fully functional GT104 GPU rather than a cut-back variant, we’re looking at 3072 CUDA cores, 192 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 256-bit memory interface paired with 8GB of 14gbps GDDR6 memory, delivering 448GB/s of memory bandwidth. Essentially making the GeForce RTX 2080 a Quadro RTX 5000 with half the memory.
Big Turing ( GT102 )
This is where we delve into rumor territory, as an alleged set of specifications has surfaced on the web indicating that the RTX 2080 may feature a very slightly cut down variant of the GPU found in the Quadro RTX 5000. Putting the GTX 2080 at 2944 CUDA cores, 23 SMs, 184 TMUs, 64 ROPs 352 Tensor Cores.
The rumored specs also put the boost clock speed of the card at ~1.75GHz, which is around the same as the Quadro RTX 8000 6000. Which is VERY conservative to put it mildly. For one thing the gaming GeForce variants of the same GPU always run at considerably higher clock speeds than their pro Quadro counterparts. Additionally, the smaller chips tend to run at higher clocks than their bigger brothers. So without question, GT104 should hit clock speeds much higher than 1.75GHz
Based on everything we know about how NVIDIA does things and has been doing things for the past 8 years, the RTX 2080 is very likely to feature a full fledged GT104 GPU. And with the clock speed increases that Turing brings to the table we’re easily looking at the new gaming king. Looks like retirement has finally come to the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti. August 20th can’t come soon enough!
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Preliminary Specifications (UPDATED August 14th)
