NVIDIA Announces Turing-Based Quadro RTX GPUs As The "World's First Ray-Tracing GPU"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Announces Turing-Based Quadro RTX GPUs As The "World's First Ray-Tracing GPU"

This morning AMD announced the Vega-based Radeon Pro WX 8200 graphics card as the "best workstation GPU under $1,000 USD" while tonight NVIDIA is trying to steal the thunder by announcing the Quadro RTX series as the "world's first ray-tracing GPU" that is also based on their new Turing architecture...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Quadro-RTX

[skehmatics]

32MB of memory

32 whole megabytes

[tildearrow]

Seems like NVLink is a major disadvantage after all...

The NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 packs 16GB of GDDR6 video memory or 32MB of memory with NVLink.

[azdaha]

Exciting new stuff from nvidia?
Linux users, RUN! Far, far away!

[blacknova]

Well, NVIDIA seem to conveniently forget PowerVR with their raytracing GPU, which have been around for quiet a while.

[GruenSein]

Well, NVIDIA seem to conveniently forget PowerVR with their raytracing GPU, which have been around for quiet a while.

True, but that never gained much traction, did it? With Nvidia, one major player is pushing this so it might have more success. Unfortunately, I suspect this will be another vendor-centric technology. Some developers will use it but as long as consoles don't have it, wide adoption might be tricky. It's no fun to put lots of effort into developing something cool that only a handful of people can use.

[coder]

True, but that never gained much traction, did it?

Imagination did sell PCIe-based raytracing accelerator cards for pro users. I have no idea how well they sold.

Before that, there was at least one prior raytracing hardware vendor, with products on the market, but I don't know if that's the same company bought by Imagination.

I suspect this will be another vendor-centric technology.

MS has already added support for it, in Direct X:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/

[FireBurn]

Any idea why they went for GDDR6 rather than HBM2?

[uid313]

Any idea why they went for GDDR6 rather than HBM2?

I don't know.
HBM is much more expensive than GDDR, but on the other hand HBM is also faster.
But Quadro are expensive, so I would think they would use HBM.
HBM are usually used for expensive cards, while GDDR for the cheaper cards.

[gamerk2]

Any idea why they went for GDDR6 rather than HBM2?

Cost. NVIDIA would have to sacrifice their margins if they went the HBM route. And most game engines aren't sensitive to memory bandwidth either, so it's not like the majority of cases are losing that much performance due to NVIDIA sticking to GDDR.