Today at the professional graphics-focused SIGGRAPH conference, NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang has unveiled details on their much-rumored next GPU architecture, codenamed Turing.

At the core of the Turing architecture are what NVIDIA is referring these as two "engines"– one for accelerating Ray Tracing, and the other for accelerating AI Inferencing.

The Ray Tracing units are called RT cores and are not to be confused with the announcement of NVIDIA RTX technology for real-time ray-tracing that we saw at GDC this year. There, NVIDIA was using their Optix AI-powered denoising filter to clean up ray-traced images, allowing them to save on rendering resources, but the actual ray-tracing was still being done on the GPU cores itself.

Now, these RT cores will perform the ray calculations themselves at what NVIDIA is claiming is up to 10 GigaRays/second, or up to 25X the performance of the current Pascal architecture.

Just like we saw in the Volta-based Quadro GV100, these new Quadro RTX cards will also feature Tensor Cores for deep learning acceleration. It is unclear if these tensor cores remain unchanged from what we saw in Volta or not.

In addition to the RT Cores and Tensor Units, Turing also features an all-new design for the tradition Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) GPU units. Changes include an integer execution unit executing in parallel with the floating point datapath, and a new unified cache architecture with double the bandwidth of the previous generation.

NVIDIA claims these changes combined with the up to 4,608 available CUDA cores in the highest configuration will enable up to 16 TFLOPS and 16 trillion integer operations per second.

Alongside the announcement of the Turing Architecture, NVIDIA unveiled the Quadro RTX 5000, 6000, 8000-series products, due in Q4 2018.

In addition to the announcements at SIGGRAPH tonight, NVIDIA is expected to announce the consumer, GeForce products featuring the Turing architecture next week at an event in Germany

PC Perspective is at both SIGGRAPH and will be at NVIDIA's event in Germany next week so stay tuned for more details!