NVIDIA rolled out its Turing GPU architecture on Monday, announcing in a press release that it would first be available in the new Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000, and Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs.

According to the firm’s release, the Turing architecture marks the biggest jump for the industry since the CUDA GPU introduction in 2006. The biggest value added in the new architecture is its hybrid rendering capability, which combines RT Cores to speed ray tracing and Tensor Cores for AI to offer real-time ray tracing for the first time, said the release.

For those unfamiliar, ray tracing is graphics rendering technique for creating more life-like light and shadows in a given scene. It simulates how light interacts with virtual objects in a graphics render.

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The problem is that ray tracing takes a long time, so producers can’t see how little changes will affect a scene without letting it fully render. Real-time ray tracing could lead to more faster renders and more effective work with the technique. It could also open up the possibility of using ray tracing in video games, which has largely been avoided due to its inability to render quickly.

“Turing is NVIDIA’s most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at the SIGGRAPH conference. “Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences. The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.”

Turing is the eighth generation of NVIDIA’s GPU architecture, the release said. It can simulate the physical world six times faster than the Pascal architecture and can do final-frame rendering for film effects 30 times faster than CPU nodes, according to the release.

“NVIDIA is delivering real-time ray tracing five years before we had thought possible,” Jon Peddie, CEO of analyst firm JPR, said in the release.

Interested developers can access AI, simulation, and ray tracing SDKs on the RTX platform here.

The big takeaways for tech leaders:

  • NVIDIA’s new Turing architecture uses hybrid rendering to enable real-time ray tracing for video producers.
  • NVIDIA’s Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000, and Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs will be the first to take advantage of the Turing architecture.