siggraph2018
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NVIDIA's Turing-powered GPUs are the first ever built for ray tracing
Earlier this year NVIDIA announced a new set of "RTX" features that included support for advanced ray tracing features, upgrading a graphics technique that simulates the way light works in the real world. It's expected to usher in a new generation of hyper-realistic graphics but there was one small problem: no one made any hardware to support the new stuff yet. Now at the SIGGRAPH conference NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang revealed eighth-generation Turing GPU hardware that's actually capable of accelerating both ray tracing and AI. Turing can render ray tracing 25x faster than old Pascal technology thanks to dedicated processors that will do the math on how light and sound travel through 3D environments. They're also the first graphics cards announced with Samsung's new GDDR6 memory on board to move data faster using less power than ever before.
AMD's Radeon Pro WX 8200 is for content creators on a budget
AMD has been pushing Intel on the CPU high-end with new, more budget-minded offerings like the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper, and now it's doing the same to NVIDIA. Just ahead of Siggraph 2018, AMD launched the Radeon Pro WX 8200, a card aimed not at gamers but workstation-using content creators. With 8GB of ECC RAM, the Vega 10-powered offers 10.8 teraflops of performance, close to that of AMD's flagship Radeon Pro WX 9100. However, the WX 8200 is less than half the price at $999, while significantly outperforming NVIDIA's similarly-priced Quadro P4000.
