Nvidia Trademarks Turing, Quadro RTX and Geforce RTX

Over the past few months, Nvidia has been filing trademark after trademark, preparing for the launch of their next-generation graphics hardware. These patents appear to focus on the company’s RTX technology, which is a process that Nvidia used to accelerate Ray Tracing workloads on their latest graphics architectures.

In this regard, three trademarks stand out, Nvidia Turing, Quadro RTX, and Geforce RTX, all of which are linked to documents that are available on the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  

The patent that is the most eye-catching here is Geforce RTX, which on its face implies that the RTX brand will replace GTX in Nvidia’s next-generation graphics lineup, though sadly this trademark makes no mention of graphics hardware. 

The Geforce RTX Trademark discusses two things, first, “Research, design and consultancy services relating to computer hardware and software, all in the field of media, multi-media and communications processors and related software”. Second “Software for operating multi-media applications, producing multi-media content and for enhancing audio clarity and video display”, which indicates that Geforce RTX is a term that refers to software, not hardware. 

In contrast, both the Quadro RTX and Turing Trademarks reference “GPUs” directly, with Quadro RTX also discussing “computer hardware and software for professional designers, engineers, and scientists for advanced graphics processing and visual computing”. The Quadro RTX trademark seems to be for hardware and its related software, whereas Turing has extremely broad usage with a lot of focus on “Artificial Intelligence”, as befits the Turing name. 

Below is an example of a video that was rendered in real-time using Nvidia’s RTX Ray Tracing technology using Microsoft’s DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR) API. This footage required four Titan V graphics card to be rendered in real-time.