Nvidia unveils real-time ray tracing Turing graphics architecture

Nvidia said it “reinvented computer graphics” with the unveiling of its Nvidia Turing graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture. The architecture will be the foundation for a whole family of future graphics chips that will focus on real-time ray tracing, or highly realistic, physically accurate graphics. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said in a keynote speech at the Siggraph computer graphics event in Vancouver, Canada, that the new design is the “greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” The architecture can process graphics at six times the speed of the previous generation. Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for artificial intelligence inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible, the company said.