Nvidia’s Turing graphics cards will coexist with Pascal until at least Q1 2019

It looks like Nvidia’s Pascal architecture will remain with us for quite some time, with Nvidia’s EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, stating that Nvidia will likely be selling Pascal and Turing concurrently during the “Holiday 2018” season. 

This means that both Turing and Pascal will be competing with each other until at least Q1 2019, with industry analysts blaming Pascal’s longevity on Nvidia’s overproduction of Pascal products during the recent cryptocurrency mining boom, leaving them overstocked after the demand for graphics cards declined after the cryptocurrency mining crash.  

Having both Turing and Pascal on the same market space will create a situation where gamers will wonder which architecture offers the best value, especially given the shockingly high price tags of Turing-based graphics cards. Nvidia’s RTX 2080 is rumoured to provide similar performance to the GTX 1080 Ti, with one having support for Nvidia’s new RTX technology while the other has an extra 3GB of VRAM capacity. 

At this time, Nvidia has only revealed their Turing RTX series graphics cards, which include the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. So far, Nvidia has not revealed 2060, or 2050 series graphics cards, making it possible that Nvidia’s GTX 1060 and GTX 1050 series graphics cards will not be released until early 2019. There are even reports that claim that the 2060 and 2050 will be GTX series graphics cards, lacking RTX support, though this has not been confirmed. 
 

  

If Nvidia wants their RTX technology to catch quickly, it would be foolish for the company to release their lower-tier graphics cards without RTX support. While lower-performing graphics cards would not be capable of using ray tracing in high-end titles, other RTX technologies like DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) would no doubt prove extremely useful to users of low-power graphics cards, making higher gaming resolutions much more achievable.  

You can join the discussion on Turing coexisting with Pascal until early 2019 on the OC3D Forums.