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With Turing, Nvidia currently only serves the high-end market. However, the middle class card GTX 2060 should also come with Turing architecture.

Where is the middle class, Nvidia?

The Turing generation of Nvidia is probably a great business success. With the RTX 2070, the RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Ti, Nvidia breaks new ground and brings real-time raytracing to the gaming market. Although this currently only works on Full HD and with about 60 FPS, it is still important pioneering work for future games development and the improvement of technology. Due to the high hardware requirements, raytracing is currently only reserved for the high-end segment. The technology is still in its early days and also needs its own Tensor and RT cores inside the Turing graphics cards. The size of the graphics chip is correspondingly gigantic. And the price is not negligible either. The cheapest RTX 2070 currently costs 505 Euros, the cheapest RTX 2080 is available for 739 Euros and the RTX 2080 ti even costs 1,199 Euros in the best case.

However, a new offshoot for the middle class with bearable prices would be really important in any case. For this sector, Nvidia currently continues to manufacture everything below the GTX 1080 from the Pascal series. So there are still GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1070, GTX 1060, GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050, because the company simply cannot serve this sector. In contrast to the high-end market, which Turing already covers, there is also a competitor here. AMD is in direct competition with Nvidia’s Pascal line-up with the RX Vega 56 and 64, but especially with the RX 580. The RX 590 presented yesterday represents another advance in this price region. That’s exactly why an affordable mid-range offshoot is so important. During a telephone conference on the quarterly figures, new information was provided.

The GTX 2060 will be a “real” Turing graphics card

The problem Nvidia has with Turing in the mainstream market is the raytracing hardware. This cores are relatively expensive, so a cheap graphics card with tensor and RT cores would not be possible. Already some time ago there were speculations that Nvidia could simply use the GP104 chip of the GTX 1080 to bring a cheap GTX 2060 onto the market. A refresh of the Pascal architecture in the mainstream segment wouldn’t even be a not doable thing. In a telephone conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has now also talked about a mainstream graphics card. The CEO of the graphics manufacturer revealed that although they have not yet announced a Turing product for the mainstream market, Nvidia is expected to develop a mainstream Turing graphics card.

We haven’t announced our future Turing product, but it would be expected for us to create a Turing GPU that serves the mainstream parts of the marketplace. And so we’re not announcing anything, but it would be conventional of us to do that. – Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO

Nvidia did not announce anything, but gave an hint what will happen in the next months. This is particularly important for investors, who often make emotional decisions. The GTX 2060 could therefore either come without any raytracing hardware or with significantly fewer tensor and RT cores. However, Nvidia is well aware that these few cores are not worth anything for raytracing. It would therefore be more logical if the GTX 2060 actually came without any raytracing hardware. Therefore we also use the old naming convention “GTX” as prefix for the 2060, because RTX refers to the raytracing capabilities.

Launch date probably in the second quarter of 2019

Nvidia is currently struggling with oversupply in the mid-range segment. So the company overslept the bursting of the mining bubble and now sits on many GTX 1060 graphics cards. The dealers are also still full of GTX 1060 GPUs. Nvidia is therefore trying not to bring another mid-range product onto the market in the near future in order to give dealers the chance to sell the remaining stocks. This is expected to continue at least this quarter, possibly in the first quarter of 2019, so it might well be possible that Nvidia will not launch a Turing midrange card until the second quarter of 2019.

Unfortunately, the company has no real competitive pressure. AMD will probably not be able to introduce a mid-range Navi graphics card until the first or second quarter of 2019. In the second half of the year, the fully loaded version of Navi could even come as an opponent for the large Turing GPUs. However, until then we will have to be satisfied with the RX 590 and the GTX 1060 with GDDR5X memory in the middle class.