Nvidia confirms Pascal and Turing GPUs will co-exist, but not compete

Why it matters: Given the price point at which Turing is launching, many have noticed that Nvidia is in no rush to retire its 10-series Pascal cards. Now we have confirmation from Nvidia the cards will remain on shop shelves throughout the holiday season.

During the recent Citi Global Technology Conference, Nvidia's CFO, Colette Kress, confirmed what many in the tech media have been mulling about since the Turing announcement: the co-existence of two generations of Nvidia GPU architectures.

According to the exec, for the remainder of the year, Turing-based RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 or RTX 2070 cards will be sold side by side with 10-series GTX cards. The company seems to justify this strategy by placing the performance of Turing front and center and charging through the nose for it: "We will be selling probably for the holiday season, both our Turing and our Pascal overall architecture. Remember, Turing is a leap forward in terms of overall capabilities. The performance improvement is much greater than the overall price."

The fact remains that Turing has a hefty price tag that puts it in an entire category of its own. As long as Nvidia can drive the idea that its performance obliterates Pascal, the Turing chips will not compete with Pascal, and the company can gradually sell off its excess 10-series inventory.

Kress also made a bold claim which ended up sounding like she'd been hitting the company's kool aid, hard. When asked for an apples-to-apples comparison of Pascal vs. Turing, she said "We will likely see a 2x improvement without even dealing with overall ray-tracing on your existing games in terms of existing performance."

Despite a lot of talk about the performance on the Turing cards, there Nvidia has been very silent about its mid-range and entry-level 20-series cards. During the conference, Kress never spilled the beans on a launch date for these, but her comments made it sound a lot like the remainder of the Turing line-up is not ray tracing-enabled. "The cards will come out. We'll start with the ray tracing cards. We have the 2080 Ti, the 2080 and the 2070 overall coming to market." If this is indeed the case, Nvidia is likely to only launch these cards when they've cleared the channel of Pascal.