The RT and tensor cores really are the only thing that’s changed. Turing Minor has the exact same DirectX feature set, the exact same core compute architecture (right on down to cache sizes), the exact same video and display blocks, etc. The good news for consumers is that, outside of RTX functionality, TU116 and its ilk – which for the sake of simplicity I’m going to call Turing Minor from here on out – is functionally equivalent to TU102/TU104/TU106 (Turing Major).
Instead the Turing family ends up having a split right down the middle. GP100, where it gets additional features not found in the consumer lineup. NVIDIA had done plenty of non-homogenous families in the past, but typically the black sheep of the family is the high-end server GPU, e.g. NVIDIA Turing GPU Comparisonīut getting back to architecture, this launch is one of a handful of times we’ve seen NVIDIA use dissimilar GPUs in their consumer cards, and it’s a situation without a good parallel. So later on it will give us an opportunity to look at performance and see if the performance gap between the GTX 1660 Ti and RTX 2070 – the full-fat cards of their respective GPUs – is anything like the sizable gap between the GTX 1060 6GB and the GTX 1080. However it’s interesting to note that on a relative basis, the transistor count difference between TU116 and TU106 is almost exactly the same as GP106 and GP104: there are 39% fewer transistors when stepping down. So we can’t fully separate the savings of dropping RTX from the savings of making a lighter GPU in general. TU116 doesn’t just drop the RTX hardware in its SMs, but it’s a smaller design overall fewer SMs, fewer memory channels, and fewer ROPs. Unfortunately, TU116 doesn’t give us a terribly good baseline for determining how much of a TU10x SM was composed of RTX hardware. Still, TU116 is some 42% bigger than the 200mm 2 GP106 die that it replaces, so even though it’s more efficient, NVIDIA is still dealing with a significant increase in die size on a generation-by-generation basis.
This greatly improves the manufacturability of the GPU and drives down its costs, especially since NVIDIA will be going into more competitive markets with it than the other TU10x GPUs.
Similarly, the transistor count has come down from 10.8 billion to 6.6 billion. This makes it 40% smaller than the next-smallest Turing GPU, TU106. With a die size of 284mm 2, TU116 tells a story in and of itself. But it also means that NVIDIA has to change how they go about promoting cards based on this GPU. The end result is a smaller, cheaper to produce GPU. As mentioned earlier in this article, NVIDIA has made a very deliberate decision to cut out their RTX functionality – the ray tracing cores and tensor cores – in order to produce a GPU that’s better suited for traditional rendering. TU116 is an interesting piece of kit, both because of the decisions that lead to this point and because of both the drawbacks and advantages of excising some of Turing’s functionality.
While NVIDIA does not announce future products in advance, you can expect that this will be the first of at least a couple of GPUs in what’s now the TU11x family, as NVIDIA is going to want to follow the same streamlined strategy for the eventual successors to GP107 and possible GP108. TU116: When Turing Is Turing… And When It Isn’tĭiving a bit deeper into matters, we have the new TU116 GPU at the heart of the GTX 1660 Ti.
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