Support for new Display Technologies

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined together, this enables support for 8K@30Hz using a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.

HDR processing is now supported natively in the display pipeline, which includes tone mapping to simulate the look of HDR images on a standard dynamic range display. Turing supports the tone mapping formula as defined by the ITU-R Recommendation BT.2100 to avoid color shift on different HDR displays.

While not inherently a feature of Turing as a whole, NVIDIA Founder Edition boards include a USB Type-C monitor connector which can also be used to connect VR headsets that support the new VirtualLink standard. VirtualLink uses an alternate mode of the USB-C connector to transmit power, video, and data at the same time. This lets one connect a VR headset using just a single cable to greatly improve the user experience since there is no longer the need to have several bulky cables that could hinder head and body movement. The standard USB-C mode of the connector lets you transfer four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort (equivalent to a single DP 1.4 connection) or two lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort + two lanes of USB (for power and input). VirtualLink changes that to four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort + one lane of USB, so sending 8K video to a VR HMD is possible. VirtualLink is an open standard and backed by NVIDIA, AMD, Oculus, Valve, and Microsoft.

As it stands, all the announced Founders Edition cards, as well as most of the announced custom board designs, include this USB-C port, but I would not be surprised if some board designs remove it and add a different connector that may be more useful to a broader range of users given VR is still a niche market on the PC. There is also the possibility that this connector is simply omitted altogether to help make for a single slot of connectors.

Improved Video Support for Encode and Decode

Turing GPUs will come with an improved NVENC video encoder that adds support for H.265 (HEVC) 8K encode at 30 FPS, while also providing up to 25% in bitrate savings for HEVC and 15% in bitrate savings for H.264 relative to the previous encoder.

For a long time now, the lower encode quality compared to pure CPU encoding has been an issue forcing many users to avoid using GPU encoding hardware for this very task. NVIDIA is now making the claim that their improved encoding engine offers better quality than software encoders, such as x264. That said, note that they used x264 at the "fast" setting for this comparison, which is not optimal for the highest quality by itself, though it remains fast enough for real-time encoding at 1080p. When it comes to 4K, even x264 in fast mode will result in dropped frames while NVENC will keep the CPU load low without missing any frames. So Turing should be a great choice for 4K streaming, while maximum quality offline encoding is still done best on the CPU, which is much slower, of course.

Turing's NVDEC video decoder engine has also been updated to support decoding of HEVC YUV444 at 10 and 12 bit HDR at 30 FPS, H.264 8K, and VP9 10/12b HDR.