Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 unveiled – what turing really is all about

1 - Einführung und Vorstellung 2 - TU102 + GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 3 - TU104 + GeForce RTX 2080 4 - TU106 + GeForce RTX 2070 5 - Performance-Anstieg für bestehende Anwendungen 6 - Tensor-Kerne und DLSS 7 - Ray Tracing in Echtzeit 8 - NVLink: als Brücke wohin? 9 - RTX-OPs: wir rechnen nach 10 - Shading-Verbesserungen 11 - Anschlüsse und Video 12 - 1-Klick-Übertaktung 13 - Tschüss, Gebläselüfter! 14 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

The TU106 and the GeForce RTX 2070: The Baby-Turing

The GeForce RTX 2070 is the third and final card announced by Nvidia at its Gamescom event. Unlike the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the RTX 2070 won't be available until October. Longingly waiting players can expect to find reference models that could start at around 600 euros, with Nvidia's own Founders Edition model likely to get a decent premium.

The GeForce RTX 2070 is built around a complete TU106 GPU consisting of three GPCs with six TPCs each. Of course, the TPCs each contain two SMs, which combine up to 36 SMs via the processor. These blocks remain unchanged between the Turing GPUs, so the RTX 2070 will be available with 2304 CUDA cores, 288 tensor cores, 36 RT cores and 144 texture units. The TU106 retains the same 256-bit memory bus as the TU104 and is also equipped with 8GB and 14Gb/s GDDR6 modules that can shovel up to 448GB/s. The 4MB L2 cache and 64 ROPs are also taken over. The only skill that is blatantly lacking is NVLink.

Although TU106 is the least complex Turing-based GPU at the time of launch, its 445 mm2 chip contains no less than 10.8 billion transistors. That's still pretty huge for what Nvidia might once have considered the center of its portfolio. In comparison, the GP106 "Midrange Pascal" was a 200 mm2 chip with 4.4 billion transistors inside. The GP104 measures 314 mm2 and contains 7.2 billion transistors. The GeForce RTX 2070, which focuses on more than GTX-1080 performance levels, really seems like an attempt to integrate tensor and RT cores as deep as possible into the chip so that these features remain available despite downscaling. It will be very interesting to see how functional they remain in almost halved quantities compared to the RTX 2080 Ti once optimized software is available.

Apart from the size of the pumped chip, the reference GEForce RTX 2070 cards based on TU106 have a TDP of 175W TDP. That at least then is less than with the GeForce GTX 1080.