The upcoming launch of NVIDIA’s new Turing GPU architecture has dominated our homepage for over a couple weeks now. In seven days the embargo for additional details on the Turing architecture will expire but in the meantime, we’ve got a few interesting statements from NVIDIA’s Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, made during the Citi 2018 Global Technology Conference Call (transcribed by Seeking Alpha).
Kress said that it’s a major leap that people probably weren’t expecting for another ten to fifteen years, clearly referring to the built-in ray-tracing capabilities. She then stated that there’ll likely be a 2x performance improvement without factoring ray-tracing, and 6x with ray-tracing enabled. Overall, she said, the performance improvement is much greater than the overall price of the new cards.
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We always liked the effect that just says, even as you upgrade to any new card, your games automatically get better, okay. What you were playing the day before and what you’re now playing will absolutely improve. We will likely see a 2x improvement without even dealing with overall ray-tracing on your existing games in terms of existing performance.
That is probably one of our largest leaps in terms of architecture-to-architecture, in terms of what we’re doing with Turing. When you get into ray-tracing, you are now talking about a 6x improvement. So have substantial improvement in terms of performance also using the ray-tracing.
When you think about our overall pricing, and when you think about our overall cards. We will be selling probably for the holiday season, both our Turing and our Pascal overall architecture. Remember, Turing is a leap forward in terms of overall capabilities. The performance improvement is much greater than the overall price. What that means is you are getting for your dollar spent tremendous more improvement.
And then I think from a value perspective is essentially how we approach our pricing. We want the overall game or to feel. Yes, I’m getting more performance. I’m getting more overall quality of my experience for every generation we say. It’s still to be seen in terms of what that mix is, how will see this. But we’re excited in terms of the portfolio of games that are coming out for ray-tracing. All the other types of games and the beginning of that holiday season is in front of us.
The 6x performance increase under ray-tracing brought by RT cores was mentioned before, but it’s the statement on the 2x performance increase for rasterization that’s more puzzling. NVIDIA’s own benchmark slide comparing the RTX 2080 with the GTX 1080 demonstrated a 50% increase or so, though admittedly Turing’s other ace in the hole, DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), delivered around 2x performance boost in titles like ARK: Survival Evolved, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, PUBG, JX3 and Final Fantasy XV.
Does that mean NVIDIA is looking to implement DLSS as widely as possible to make good on this claim? It’s too early to say right now. Certainly, given the prices of the new GeForce RTX line of GPUs, stating that Turing’s performance improvement is much greater than the price sets a high bar for the reviews.
