NVIDIA Announces the GeForce RTX 20 Series: RTX 2080 Ti & 2080 on Sept. 20th, RTX 2070 in October
by Ryan Smith on August 20, 2018 4:00 PM ESTNVIDIA’s Gamescom 2018 keynote just wrapped up, and as many have been expecting since it was announced last month, NVIDIA is getting ready to launch their next generation of GeForce hardware. Announced at the event and going on sale starting September 20th is NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20 series, which is succeeding the current Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 10 series. Based on NVIDIA’s new Turing GPU architecture and built on TSMC’s 12nm “FFN” process, NVIDIA has lofty goals, looking to drive an entire paradigm shift in how games are rendered and how PC video cards are evaluated. CEO Jensen Huang has called Turing NVIDIA’s most important GPU architecture since 2006’s Tesla GPU architecture (G80 GPU), and from a features standpoint it’s clear that he’s not overstating matters.
As is traditionally the case, the first cards out of the NVIDIA stable are the high-end cards. But in a rather sizable break from tradition we’re not only going to get the x80 and x70 cards at launch, but also the x80 Ti card as well. Meaning the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 will all be hitting the streets within a month of each other. NVIDIA’s product stack is remaining unchanged here, so RTX 2080 Ti remains their flagship card, while RTX 2080 is their high-end card, and then RTX 2070 the slightly cheaper card to entice enthusiasts without breaking the bank.
All three cards will be launching over the next two months. First off will be the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080, which will launch September 20th. The RTX 2080 Ti will start at $999 for partner cards, while the RTX 2080 will start at $699. Meanwhile the RTX 2070 will launch at some point in October, with partner cards starting at $499. On a historical basis, all of these prices are higher than the last generation by anywhere between $120 and $300. Meanwhile NVIDIA’s own reference-quality Founders Edition cards are once again back, and those will carry a $100 to $200 premium over the baseline pricing.
Unfortunately, NVIDIA is already taking pre-orders here, so consumers are essentially required to make a “blind buy” if they want to snag a card from the first batch. NVIDIA has offered surprisingly little information on performance and we’d suggest waiting for trustworthy third-party reviews (i.e. us), however I have to admit that I don’t imagine there’s going to be much stock available by the time reviews hit the streets.
NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison | ||||||
RTX 2080 Ti | RTX 2080 | RTX 2070 | GTX 1080 | |||
CUDA Cores | 4352 | 2944 | 2304 | 2560 | ||
Core Clock | 1350MHz | 1515MHz | 1410MHz | 1607MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1545MHz | 1710MHz | 1620MHz | 1733MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 10Gbps GDDR5X | ||
Memory Bus Width | 352-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | ||
VRAM | 11GB | 8GB | 8GB | 8GB | ||
Single Precision Perf. | 13.4 TFLOPs | 10.1 TFLOPs | 7.5 TFLOPs | 8.9 TFLOPs | ||
Tensor Perf. | 440T OPs (INT4) |
? | ? | N/A | ||
Ray Perf. | 10 GRays/s | 8 GRays/s | 6 GRays/s | N/A | ||
"RTX-OPS" | 78T | 60T | 45T | N/A | ||
TDP | 250W | 215W | 175W | 180W | ||
GPU | Big Turing | Unnamed Turing | Unnamed Turing | GP104 | ||
Transistor Count | 18.6B | ? | ? | 7.2B | ||
Architecture | Turing | Turing | Turing | Pascal | ||
Manufacturing Process | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 16nm | ||
Launch Date | 09/20/2018 | 09/20/2018 | 10/2018 | 05/27/2016 | ||
Launch Price | MSRP: $999 Founders $1199 |
MSRP: $699 Founders $799 |
MSRP: $499 Founders $599 |
MSRP: $599 Founders $699 |
NVIDIA's Turing Architecture: RT & Tensor Cores
So what does Turing bring to the table? The marquee feature across the board is hybrid rendering, which combines ray tracing with traditional rasterization to exploit the strengths of both technologies. This announcement is essentially a continuation of NVIDIA’s RTX announcement from earlier this year, so if you thought that announcement was a little sparse, well then here is the rest of the story.
The big change here is that NVIDIA is going to be including even more ray tracing hardware with Turing in order to offer faster and more efficient hardware ray tracing acceleration. New to the Turing architecture is what NVIDIA is calling an RT core, the underpinnings of which we aren’t fully informed on at this time, but serve as dedicated ray tracing processors. These processor blocks accelerate both ray-triangle intersection checks and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) manipulation, the latter being a very popular data structure for storing objects for ray tracing.
NVIDIA is stating that the fastest GeForce RTX part can cast 10 Billion (Giga) rays per second, which compared to the unaccelerated Pascal is a 25x improvement in ray tracing performance.
The Turing architecture also carries over the tensor cores from Volta, and indeed these have even been enhanced over Volta. The tensor cores are an important aspect of multiple NVIDIA initiatives. Along with speeding up ray tracing itself, NVIDIA’s other tool in their Turing bag of tricks is to reduce the amount of rays required in a scene by using AI denoising to clean up an image, which is something the tensor cores excel at. Of course that’s not the only feature tensor cores are for – NVIDIA’s entire AI/neural networking empire is all but built on them – so while not a primary focus for the Gamescom crowd, this also confirms that NVIDIA’s most powerful neural networking hardware will be coming to a wider range of GPUs.
Looking at hybrid rendering in general, it’s interesting that despite these individual speed-ups, NVIDIA’s overall performance promises aren’t quite as extreme. All told, the company is promising a 6x performance boost versus Pascal, and this doesn’t specify against which parts. Time will tell if even this is a realistic assessment, as even with the RT cores, ray tracing in general is still quite the resource hog.
As for gaming matters in particular, the benefits of hybrid rendering are potentially significant, but it’s going to depend heavily on how developers choose to use it. From performance standpoint I’m not sure there’s much to say here, and that’s because ray tracing & hybrid rendering are ultimately features to improve rendering quality, not improve the performance of today’s algorithms. Granted, if you tried to do ray tracing on today’s GPUs it would be extremely slow – and Turing an incredible speedup as a result – but no one uses slow path tracing systems on current hardware for this reason. So hybrid rendering is instead about replacing the approximations and hacks of current rasterization technology with more accurate rendering methods. In other words, less “faking it” and more “making it.”
Those quality benefits, in turn, are typically clustered around lighting, shadows, and reflections. All three features are inherently based on the properties of light, which in simplistic terms moves as a ray, and which up to now various algorithms have been faking the work involved or “pre-baking” scenes in advance. And while current algorithms are quite good, they still aren’t close to accurate. So there is clear room for improvement.
NVIDIA for their part is particularly throwing around global illumination, which is one of the harder tasks. However there are other lighting methods that benefit as well, not to mention reflections and shadows of those lit objects. And truthfully this is where words are a poor tool; it’s difficult to describe how a ray traced shadow looks better than a fake shadow with PCSS, or real-time lighting over pre-baked lighting. Which is why NVIDIA, the video card company, is going to be pushing the visual aspects of all of this harder than ever.
Overall then, hybrid rendering is the lynchpin feature of the GeForce RTX 20 series. Going by their Gamescom and SIGGRAPH presentations, it’s clear that NVIDIA has invested heavily into the field, and that they have bet the success of the GeForce brand over the coming years on this technology. RT cores and tensor cores are semi-fixed function hardware; they can’t be used for rasterization, and the transistors allocated to them are transistors that could have been dedicated to more rasterization hardware otherwise. So NVIDIA has made an incredibly significant move here in terms of opportunity cost by going the hybrid rendering route rather than building a bigger Pascal.
As a result, NVIDIA is attempting a paradigm shift in consumer rendering, one that we’ve really only see before with the introduction of pixel and vertex shaders (DX8 & DX9 era tech) all the way back in 2001 & 2002. Which is why Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) initiative is so important, as are NVIDIA’s other developer and consumer initiatives. NVIDIA needs to sell consumers and developers alike on this vision of mixing rasterization with ray tracing to provide better image quality. And more so than that, they need to ease developers into the idea of working with more specialized, fixed function units as Moore’s Law continues to slow down and fixed function hardware becomes a means to achieve greater efficiency.
NVIDIA hasn’t bet the farm on hybrid rendering, but they’ve never attempted to move the market in this fashion. So if it seems like NVIDIA is hyper-focused on hybrid rendering and ray tracing, that’s because they are. It’s their vision of the future, and now they need to get everyone else on board.
Turing SM: Dedicated INT Cores, Unified Cache, Variable Rate Shading
Alongside the dedicated RT and tensor cores, the Turing architecture Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) itself is also learning some new tricks. In particular here, it’s inheriting one of Volta’s more novel changes, which saw the Integer cores separated out into their own blocks, as opposed to being a facet of the Floating Point CUDA cores. The advantage here – at least as much as we saw in Volta – is that it speeds up address generation and Fused Multiply Add (FMA) performance, though as with a lot of aspects of Turing, there’s likely more to it (and what it can be used for) than we’re seeing today.
The Turing SM also includes what NVIDIA is calling a “unified cache architecture.” As I’m still awaiting official SM diagrams from NVIDIA, it’s not clear if this is the same kind of unification we saw with Volta – where the L1 cache was merged with shared memory – or if NVIDIA has gone one step further. At any rate NVIDIA is saying that it offers twice the bandwidth of the “previous generation” which is unclear if NVIDIA means Pascal or Volta (with the latter being more likely).
Finally, also tucked away in the SIGGRAPH Turing press release is the mention of support for variable rate shading. This is a relatively young and upcoming graphics rendering technique that there's limited information about (especially as to how exactly NVIDIA is implementing it). But at a very high level it sounds like the next generation of NVIDIA's multi-res shading technology, which allows developers to render different areas of a screen at various effective resolutions, in order to concentrate quality (and rendering time) in to the areas where it's the most beneficial.
Feeding the Beast: GDDR6 Support
As the memory used by GPUs is developed by outside companies, there are no big secrets here. The JEDEC and its big 3 members Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, have all been developing GDDR6 memory as the successor to both GDDR5 and GDDR5X, and NVIDIA ha confirmed that Turing will support it. Depending on the manufacturer, first-generation GDDR6 is generally promoted as offering up to 16Gbps per pin of memory bandwidth, which is 2x that of NVIDIA’s late-generation GDDR5 cards, and 40% faster than NVIDIA’s most recent GDDR5X cards.
GPU Memory Math: GDDR6 vs. HBM2 vs. GDDR5X | ||||||||
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (GDDR6) |
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (GDDR6) |
NVIDIA Titan V (HBM2) |
NVIDIA Titan Xp |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | |||
Total Capacity | 11 GB | 8 GB | 12 GB | 12 GB | 11 GB | 8 GB | ||
B/W Per Pin | 14 Gb/s | 1.7 Gb/s | 11.4 Gbps | 11 Gbps | ||||
Chip capacity | 1 GB (8 Gb) | 4 GB (32 Gb) | 1 GB (8 Gb) | |||||
No. Chips/KGSDs | 11 | 8 | 3 | 12 | 11 | 8 | ||
B/W Per Chip/Stack | 56 GB/s | 217.6 GB/s | 45.6 GB/s | 44 GB/s | ||||
Bus Width | 352-bit | 256-bit | 3092-bit | 384-bit | 352-bit | 256-bit | ||
Total B/W | 616 GB/s | 448GB/s | 652.8 GB/s | 547.7 GB/s | 484 GB/s | 352 GB/s | ||
DRAM Voltage | 1.35 V | 1.2 V (?) | 1.35 V |
Relative to GDDR5X, GDDR6 is not quite as big of a step up as some past memory generations, as many of GDDR6’s innovations were already baked into GDDR5X. None the less, alongside HBM2 for very high end use cases, it is expected to become the backbone memory of the GPU industry. The principle changes here include lower operating voltages (1.35v), and internally the memory is now divided into two memory channels per chip. For a standard 32-bit wide chip then, this means a pair of 16-bit memory channels, for a total of 16 such channels on a 256-bit card. While this in turn means there is a very large number of channels, GPUs are also well-positioned to take advantage of it since they are massively parallel devices to begin with.
NVIDIA for their part has confirmed that the first GeForce RTX cards will run their GDDR6 at 14Gbps, which happens to be the fastest speed grade offered by all of the Big 3 members. We know that NVIDIA is exclusively using Samsung's GDDR6 for their Quadro RTX cards – presumably because they need the density – however for the GeForce RTX cards the field should be open to all of the memory manufacturers. Though in the long run this leaves two avenues open to higher capacity cards: either moving up to 16Gb density chips, or going clamshell with the 8Gb chips they’re using now.
Odds & Ends: NVLink SLI, VirtualLink, & 8K HEVC
While this wasn’t mentioned in NVIDIA’s Gamescom presentation itself, NVIDIA’s GeForce 20 Series website confirms that SLI will once again be available for some high-end GeForce RTX cards. Specifically, both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 will support SLI. Meanwhile the RTX 2070 will not support SLI; this being a departure from the 1070 which did offer it.
However the bigger aspect of that news is that NVIDIA’s proprietary cache coherent GPU interconnect, NVLink, will be coming to consumer cards. The GeForce GTX cards will be implementing SLI over NVLInk, with 2 NVLink channels running between each card. At a combined 50GB/sec of full-duplex bandwidth – meaning there’s 50GB of bandwidth available in each direction – this is a major upgrade over NVIDIA’s previous HB-SLI link. This is on top of NVLink’s other feature benefits, particularly cache coherence. And all of this comes at an important time, as inter-GPU bandwidth requirements keep rising with each generation.
Now the big question is whether this will reverse the ongoing decline of SLI, and at the moment I’m taking a somewhat pessimistic approach, but I’m eager to hear more from NVIDIA. 50GB/sec is a big improvement over HB-SLI, however it’s still only a fraction of the 448GB/sec (or more) of local memory bandwidth available to a GPU. So on its own it doesn’t fix the problems that have dogged multi-GPU rendering, either with AFR synchronization or effective workload splitting. In that respect it’s likely telling that NVIDIA doesn’t support NVLink SLI on the RTX 2070.
Meanwhile gamers something new to look forward to for VR, with the addition of VirtualLink support. The USB Type-C alternate mode was announced last month, and supports 15W+ of power, 10Gbps of USB 3.1 Gen 2 data, and 4 lanes of DisplayPort HBR3 video all over a single cable. In other words, it’s a DisplayPort 1.4 connection with extra data and power that is intended to allow a video card to directly drive a VR headset. The standard is backed by NVIDIA, AMD, Oculus, Valve, and Microsoft, so GeForce RTX cards will be the first of what we expect will ultimately be a number of products supporting the standard.
USB Type-C Alternate Modes | ||||||
VirtualLink | DisplayPort (4 Lanes) |
DisplayPort (2 Lanes) |
Base USB-C | |||
Video Bandwidth (Raw) | 32.4Gbps | 32.4Gbps | 16.2Gbps | N/A | ||
USB 3.x Data Bandwidth | 10Gbps | N/A | 10Gbps | 10Gbps + 10Gbps | ||
High Speed Lane Pairs | 6 | 4 | ||||
Max Power | Mandatory: 15W Optional: 27W |
Optional: Up To 100W |
Finally, while NVIDIA only briefly touched upon the subject, we do know that their video encoder block, NVENC, has been updated for Turing. The latest iteration of NVENC specifically adds support for 8K HEVC encoding. Meanwhile NVIDIA has also been able to further tune the quality of their encoder, allowing them to achieve similar quality as before with a 25% lower video bitrate.
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Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
EDIT:What I think is true is that with more AMD competition in the past prices dropped sooner after the debut. You can't use the Pascal generation for that comparison though, because it was a unique situation due to the crypto-currency craze and skyrocketing DRAM prices.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
Oh, one last comment. There's another reason prices dropped faster in the past and that's because the time between generations/refreshes was shorter. But I do think that AMD competition was also a factor.eddman - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
When Pascal cards launched crypto-currency craze was yet to begin. Their MSRP was not affected by it. The craze began a few months later.eddman - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
No, a business prices their stuff based on how much they can get from buyers. They can make a card that costs $200 to make, including R&D and else, and sell it for $1000 if they know 1) there is no competition and 2) there are enough people willing to pay for it. That's overpricing and they still can and will do it.We don't know how much these cards cost but I VERY much doubt they are on the edge of losing money per card. I have no proof, obviously, but I suspect they could drop 2080 Ti to $800, or even less, and still make a lot of profit. Do you think they would've still gone with such high prices if AMD was able to respond properly.
Missed the point. Fermis were cheap (vs. now) because of AMD. 600 series did not have a big-chip card. The prices of big-chip cards went way up after fermi, starting with 780, and stayed that way since AMD could not properly compete.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
"No, a business prices their stuff based on how much they can get from buyers."Yes, exactly. That's what they ALWAYS do. It's not "overpricing", it's correct pricing. They price to maximize their profits.
"We don't know how much these cards cost but I VERY much doubt they are on the edge of losing money per card."
I never said they were on the edge of losing money per card.I can guarantee you they are no where near being on the edge of losing money per card. And they shouldn't be anywhere near there. You, as a consumer, shouldn't want them to be there, because if they were then they would have no money for investment and no ability to absorb any sort of recession or market downturn. But it's all irrelevant. The point we are supposed to be discussing in this thread is whether NVIDIA is making MORE money on the Turing cards than on cards in the same market segment in the past. That is what you seemed to claim and that is what I and that other guy are arguing against. And I have given you evidence that no, they are not.
"Do you think they would've still gone with such high prices if AMD was able to respond properly."
Yes, because AMD would have also gone with such high prices if they could respond properly.
"Missed the point. Fermis were cheap (vs. now) because of AMD."
Fermis were not cheap. I demonstrated that. In fact I looked even deeper since then and found that the Tesla-based GTX 280 launched in 2008 for $650. That's $760 in today's money, which is $60 more than the RTX 2080 is launching. AMD was competitive at that time.
What has happened is that at times when AMD wasn't competitive and hardly anyone was buying their cards they lowered the prices of their GPUs to minimize their losses. NVIDIA responded to maintain their market share. That's less the result of healthy competition and more the result of a desperate company trying not to bleed cash. If AMD has a strong product they too will try to charge as much as they can for it. And that's exactly what they did in the past. And prices overall have not gone up or down in all that time.
"The prices of big-chip cards went way up after fermi, starting with 780, and stayed that way since AMD could not properly compete."
No. The Maxwell cards were among the cheapest, historically. And NVIDIA's market dominance was greatest during the Maxwell period.
Anyway, I'm out. Thanks for the conversation.
eddman - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
... except when there is no competition, it turns into overpricing. They are charging more than the card being replaced in that category, ergo they are overpricing. Simple as that.No, I didn't claim they are making more money. I'm saying the profit margin is probably high enough that they could cut the price and still make a healthy amount of money without being anywhere near the edge and without getting into any kind of financial problems. I don't want them to barely even out but I also don't want to be price gouged. Why are you even defending this? Do you like being overcharged?
No, if AMD was in proper shape it would've probably ended up like fermi era pricing.
You missed the point again and also missed a massive historical incident. You do realize that nvidia cut 280's price to $500 just a month after launch because it was unable to compete with 4870 at $650? There goes that argument.
Fermi's ARE among the cheapest cards in the past 14 years.
No, maxwells are not the cheapest big-chips; not even close. That honor goes to 285, 480 and 580. Fermis about $570-580, and 285 about $470. 980 Ti's launch price is about $690 today.
You said you were out and then came back.
eddman - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
I just want to add that since I haven't mastered english yet, sometimes it might seem I'm being disrespectful. That's not the case. It's good to have a healthy discussion/argument once in a while.eddman - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
*No edit button*8800 GTX launched for the same $600 as 7800 GTX, so the "it is more expensive because of newer technologies" does not hold water.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
"It's more expensive because of newer technologies" does hold water. You cannot claim to have refuted a statement simply by refuting one piece of evidence in support of it.Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
I meant to say "...simply by refuting one piece of evidence provided in support of it."