Nvidia gave a big hint that new gaming graphics cards are on the way. On Monday, the company announced its latest GPU architecture called Turing, which promises to render graphics six times faster over the company's Pascal architecture from 2016.
The new architecture is designed to enable realistic-looking light and shadow effects or what the industry calls "ray tracing." Turing can accelerate real-time ray tracing up to 25 times faster than the previous Pascal generation.
Nvidia also built the new architecture to run AI-powered applications that can both shade and smooth out graphics for high-quality image generation. "Turing is Nvidia's most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade," said the company's CEO Jensen Huang at the SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, where he talked up the new technology. (The picture below is an example of Turing in action.)
However, Monday's announcement was geared more at designers, film artists and the enterprise segment than actual gamers. On the same day, Nvidia announced the first graphics cards that will use Turing, all of which are part of the company's ultra high-end Quadro line.
These products are insanely expensive. The cheapest of three, the Quadro RTX 5000 will retail for $2,300. The RTX 6000 will go for $6,300, while the RTX 8000 will cost a whopping $10,000.
Despite the high price, Nvidia claims that the new Turing architecture inside the graphics cards will "revolutionize" how designers render graphics in real-time. "Users can now enjoy powerful capabilities that weren't expected to be available for at least five more years," said Nvidia vice president Bob Pette in a statement.
How Turing will translate into gaming graphics isn't clear. But Nvidia is expected to a make a big announcement at the Gamescom conference in Germany later this month.
The new Quadro cards will be available starting in this year's fourth quarter.