Is It The 1080 TI The Best GPU Ever?

[Zyll Goliat]

I just watched video by Gamer Nexus:"The Greatest GPU of All Time Nvidia 1080TI 2024 Revisit" ...Then I asked myself:"Is It...Really?" remembering all my previous gpu's starting long time ago from the very first 3d cards when they arrived at the end od the '90's till this days there was some GPU's that have huge impact on gaming industry there is almost 26 years now from the first RIVA TNT card and then who could forget Voodoo 3dfx cards Ati Rage...Matrox....GeForce 256.....GeForce FX Series.....ATI 9000.....majestic 8800GTX.....etc....and then we come to the "modern 2010-" era where we also have some really awesome GPU's....So the question is simple Is It The 1080 TI really The Best Card Ever if we put following parameters as the most important:

1)Performance
2)Price
3)Tech Innovation
4)Longevity

What is your opinion is the 1080TI the best GPU ever if not what card do you believe is better then 1080 TI....please share your opinion with us bellow.....

 

[Dr. Dro]

Not really. It's just the third tier GP102 product behind the 2016 Titan X Pascal and the 2017 Titan Xp. It was more affordable than those two, and perhaps a little too good value for money. But the 1080 Ti is very much an obsolete graphics card nowadays. It'll run DirectX 11 games great, but... that's about it. It does what it has to do, if you buy even something as simple as an RX 7600 you have a much better graphics card today IMHO.

Also, don't expect driver support for much longer. Nvidia surprisingly hasn't pulled the plug on Maxwell, but I suspect they'll drop both Maxwell and Pascal at once. With them being 10 and 8 years old respectively, their support schedule is very much about to expire.

 

[Solaris17]

Yikes, you know I get it. Its still a great card. a lot of those series are. the 980 was also fantastic. I appreciate the longevity too. I think that has a lot to do with things like directX API maturity after DX9.

I will argue it isnt though. I think it gets helped along by other technologies that like DX, WDDM, OS scheduling, etc keep it relevant because its so powerful.

I dont think its the greatest of all time though. Im thinking cards that really changed the game. Back when 3D was up and coming performance % and technological changes were absolutely wild. Im talking 6800's, 9250's, 9800XTs, FX5700's. Changing from PCI to AGP. That was a wild wild time to be into PCs.

 

[Zyll Goliat]

Not really. It's just the third tier GP102 product behind the 2016 Titan X Pascal and the 2017 Titan Xp. It was more affordable than those two, and perhaps a little too good value for money. But the 1080 Ti is very much an obsolete graphics card nowadays. It'll run DirectX 11 games great, but... that's about it. It does what it has to do, if you buy even something as simple as an RX 7600 you have a much better graphics card today IMHO.

Also, don't expect driver support for much longer. Nvidia surprisingly hasn't pulled the plug on Maxwell, but I suspect they'll drop both Maxwell and Pascal at once. With them being 10 and 8 years old respectively, their support schedule is very much about to expire.

I am not sure that you understand the real meaning of the question Best GPU ever .....It's not the point to compare the1080 TI with the most modern cards of today the point is overall best from back in their era when we compare Price,Performance,Longevity and Tech innovation....

Yikes, you know I get it. Its still a great card. a lot of those series are. the 980 was also fantastic. I appreciate the longevity too. I think that has a lot to do with things like directX API maturity after DX9.

I will argue it isnt though. I think it gets helped along by other technologies that like DX, WDDM, OS scheduling, etc keep it relevant because its so powerful.

I dont think its the greatest of all time though. Im thinking cards that really changed the game. Back when 3D was up and coming performance % and technological changes were absolutely wild. Im talking 6800's, 9250's, 9800XTs, FX5700's. Changing from PCI to AGP. That was a wild wild time to be into PCs.

Yeah I totally agree with you....and I am still digging all those cards in my head and can't decide some of those cards have enormous tech innovation also other have huge performance jump compared to the previous gen but most of those have short longevity compared to the 1080 TI.....ahhh it's just difficult to said:"This is the CARD to rule them all!!!"

 

[Onasi]

Of the last decade as far as price to performance and longevity at the high end is concerned? Sure, everything after Pascal was/is so overall meh that it wins kinda by default.
Of all time though? Nah, not really. It isn’t historically important enough for that. It’s no Voodoo, no 9700 Pro, no 8800. At the end of the day - it’s just a card.
Hell, I would say it wasn’t probably even the most important card of the Pascal gen - that honor goes to the 1060 for getting so many people into PC gaming at the time with its killer price to perf. There’s a reason why it was the top card on Steam HW for so long. NV AND AMD both are yet to repeat such a killer mid-range offer and until/unless they do I truly believe that the future of DIY PC gaming is sorta grim.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

On one hand, 1080 Ti offers much more FPS per $ compared to newer models such as 2080 Ti.
On the other hand, 2080 Ti offers:
• Ray tracing. You can touch it, you can see it, you can smell it. You can form your decision upon it and yes, 2080 Ti offers reasonable RT performance.
• DLSS. Might be considered overrated by some image quality elitists but overall, it's a much more solid performance booster than lowering your settings in other ways (lesser resolution feels funky, less detailed shadows also feel somewhat questionable). Also it's leagues ahead of XeSS and especially FSR.
• More baseline performance. Which is just great despite the insane 1200+ dollar price tag.

You also should thank AMD for not releasing anything that can compete with 1080 Ti until 2019 and with 2080 Ti, until late 2020. 3080 Ti is still uncontested in heavy RT, not to mention better green GPUs. This is what makes prices crazy high and progress less noticeable.

1080 Ti also wasn't much of a tech innovation, it was just more of the same. Maxwell offered serious improvements over Kepler in DX11 and drastic advancements in Vulkan and DX12 (that's why GTX 780 Ti can't keep up with GTX 960 in 2020+ titles). However, Pascal GPUs only were better in raw performance thanks to a much more efficient node.

So, the best tech innovations are long gone with the 8800 GTX being the latest of such.
Performance per dollar stopped increasing much with the introduction of RTX tech.
With DX12, RT and DLSS becoming more and more of a thing I can place my bet on 2080 Ti being a much beefier longevity monster than a 1080 Ti which struggles with DX12 and virtually can't handle RT and DLSS.

Take Cyberpunk 2077 for example: before FSR and XeSS had been introduced to this title, DLSS-powered 2080 Ti achieved 50 to 60 FPS at 4K (with DLSS on Quality, mind me), whereas 1080 Ti is in low 50s at 1080p... This difference is not just noticeable, it's huge.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I am not sure that you understand the real meaning of the question Best GPU ever .....It's not the point to compare the1080 TI with the most modern cards of today the point is overall best from back in their era when we compare Price,Performance,Longevity and Tech innovation....


Yeah I totally agree with you....and I am still digging all those cards in my head and can't decide some of those cards have enormous tech innovation also other have huge performance jump compared to the previous gen but most of those have short longevity compared to the 1080 TI.....ahhh it's just difficult to said:"This is the CARD to rule them all!!!"

It didn't offer any tech innovation, Pascal had been in-market for a year at the point it released. What 1080 Ti did was bring the same performance they asked $1200 for with the Titan X and sell it to everyone else at much more palatable $700. Which was a whole metric ton of performance at the time, no kidding, but then again if money was no object, Titan V came out the same year a full generational leap ahead of that and then some. Some people's enamored view of Pascal as an architecture endured due to the very high prices of Turing, but it was Turing that innovated and brought new things to the table, not Pascal.

The RTX 20 series were the first DX12 Ultimate compatible cards and the first true next-gen GPUs as we know today. The high prices due to die sizes/yield and lack of compatible software at the time made it an unattractive proposal to most people except those who wished to stay at the bleeding edge, for everyone else, the GTX 1080 Ti offered everything they wanted and more, at a discount price. No wonder it got so popular.

I don't have this romanticized view of it, especially since at the time I was an AMD diehard. I was riding with the Vega Frontier Edition at the time (2018-2020 timeframe) and eventually purchased a Radeon VII before I decided to buy the 3090.

 

[Zyll Goliat]

Of the last decade as far as price to performance and longevity at the high end is concerned? Sure, everything after Pascal was/is so overall meh that it wins kinda by default.
Of all time though? Nah, not really. It isn’t historically important enough for that. It’s no Voodoo, no 9700 Pro, no 8800. At the end of the day - it’s just a card.
Hell, I would say it wasn’t probably even the most important card of the Pascal gen - that honor goes to the 1060 for getting so many people into PC gaming at the time with its killer price to perf. There’s a reason why it was the top card on Steam HW for so long. NV AND AMD both are yet to repeat such a killer mid-range offer and until/unless they do I truly believe that the future of DIY PC gaming is sorta grim.

Aye....from the last decade sure no doubt....but overall I still can not decide and battling myself between Voodoo,8800 GT&GTX 'tho1080 TI it's right there because of longevity and the price/performance crap even the RX 480/580 was great just because of the price and overall longevity....

 

[Onasi]

Some people's enamored view of Pascal as an architecture endured due to the very high prices of Turing, but it was Turing that innovated and brought new things to the table, not Pascal.

I think that Pascal is beloved, as I mentioned before, because of the 1060 and 1070 being absolute killer deals. That, and the enormous gen over gen jump in performance. I think the romanticization of the 1080Ti is a more recent thing, as you mentioned, caused by the absolute bottom sh*t tier state of the GPU market ever since.

I still can not decide and battling myself between Voodoo,8800 GT&GTX 'tho1080 TI it's right there because of longevity and the price/performance crap even the RX 480/580 was great just because of the price and overall longevity....

Naw dawg, while longevity is cool and all the 1080Ti just lacks the historical impact to be compared to the OG Voodoo or, say, 8800 and its unified shaders.

 

[Tomgang]

out of all the cards i´ve had over the time. Yes GTX 1080 TI was the best card i ever had. It has a great amout of Vram that even today is sufficient for most games. Price was great to, not cheap but well priced for what is was. Specielly compared to later TI cards. Power consumption was also prety desent with 250 watt for a top tier card compared to rtx 380 320 watt or my current RRTX 4090 with 450 watt.

I had by the way a EVGA GTX 1080 TI GAMING FTW3 RGB version. This card was even just a true dual slot card to. No triple or quad slot cooler. Over all a card if not the best, then deffently a card that is among the best for various reasons uncluding what i all ready told.

1080 Ti has a special place for me as i had one.

this was the last picture i had of my card in my old X58 build before moving to AM4.

 

[Sithaer]

For me it was the 8800 GT tho I might be biased since it was the card that was in my first own PC and it was a massive upgrade over my 7800 GT and the 8800 served me for almost 3 years until it died on me sadly.
I was a fresh high school graduate at the time and considering that it was fairly affordable even for me it ran everything I threw at it for years. Probably the closest I ever was to owning a 'higher end' card and ever since I've only had budget-mid range cards at a given time. 'hence my close second favourite is the RX 570'

1080 Ti was already out of my budget type of a card so I can't relate much but it sure kept on going for a long time and it still does alright.

 

[Zyll Goliat]

Naw dawg, while longevity is cool and all the 1080Ti just lacks the historical impact to be compared to the OG Voodoo or, say, 8800 and its unified shaders.

Yeah I hear you man.....I remember my very first 3D card somewhere in 97-98 it was Diamond Viper V330 4mb of ram and it was based on Nvidia Riva 128 and yeah back in those days those 3d accelerated cards had that WoW also historical and personal Impact on me but from other hand those cards was completely useless in year or even less 'tho a bit later My Voodoo Banshee was really awesome and did survive a bit longer then that....

 

[Nater]

For me it was the 8800 GT tho I might be biased since it was the card that was in my first own PC and it was a massive upgrade over my 7800 GT and the 8800 served me for almost 3 years until it died on me sadly.
I was a fresh high school graduate at the time and considering that it was fairly affordable even for me it ran everything I threw at it for years. Probably the closest I ever was to owning a 'higher end' card and ever since I've only had budget-mid range cards at a given time. 'hence my close second favourite is the RX 570'

1080 Ti was already out of my budget type of a card so I can't relate much but it sure kept on going for a long time and it still does alright.

You just reminded me I have an 8800GT in it's original box packed away. It has that giant Arctic Accelero(?) cooler on it. I replaced it with a Radeon 6970 that's sitting over here on the shelf somewhere in a PC boneyard.

I quit gaming for almost 10 years after that last ATI upgrade. Next card I bought was a used GTX 1070 on eBay. My kid spilled coke on it a couple years ago and burned it up. It posts, but doesn't game.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Yeah put the bad ass 1080ti ftw3 on water/ shunt mod it and it's groovy for the price performance hehe
By the way RT is freaking joke lol

 

[agent_x007]

Point was "best buy" when it was released vs. future things (similar to 8800 GT, or GTX 1070).
Main problem of cards before DX10 is just plain performance/feature race.
There is NO WAY you could get away with using a Voodoo(2) of GeForce 3 for 7 years straight in main PC (so, OG Voodoo until 2003, or GF3 until 2008) by expecting them to run all latest games.
When GPU fails to launch games... there is no point to it anymore, and needs to replaced.

GTX 1080 Ti can still run latest games. Although, it's longevity is more to do how everything played out (DirectX being feature level, memory speed development slowing down), and not Voodoo/GF3 being less important cards.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

My kid spilled coke on it a couple years ago and burned it up.

Oh I entriely know your pain. My mum's cat destroyed my first PC (I was 14) when I was at gym. Luckily I had some savings and could buy replacements but still.

 

[Fouquin]

I actually agree with Steve on this one, but only so far as the 1080 Ti is the GOAT in terms of longevity for the common man. The GTX 1080 Ti brought a $1000 performance tier down to $700, defeated the replacement $1000 performance part (Titan Xp; full GP02), defeated yet another replacement $800 part (RTX 2080), maintained its price positioning through the 2017 mining craze due to the lack of crypto algos that could leverage it while other cards were scalped 2-3x their value, maintained its performance-per-dollar positioning during the NEXT mining/crypto boom and the pandemic essentially serving as one of a handful of GPUs anyone could find to buy that still had reasonable performance to offer, and STILL sells for 20-30% less than its performance class modern counterparts (though not less than used performance class counterparts.)

The last card that held crowns as bastions of the common gamer were cards like the Radeon HD 5770 and the 8800 GT. Notably neither of those are enthusiast tier offerings, also notably both of those cards had relevant service lives of about 3-4 years while the 1080 Ti is enjoying 7 years of relevance. For sheer relevance alone you could argue the HD 7970 carried that crown for awhile, as the 2011 variant, then the 2012 GHz edition, then the 2013 R9 280X seeing a lot of use up until 2017. But during the mining craze of 2013 the 7970 was scalped hard along with most Radeons back to the 5000 series so it doesn't even hold up to the 1080 Ti in that respect.

Going back, obviously the 9700 Pro is legendary, but it was really only legendary for about 20 months and was struggling to run games by 2004 (with reviewers not even bothering to test it anymore because 30FPS was just not possible in many titles by then). GeForce2 GTS was legendary, was outclassed in features after 10 months and raw performance as well in 22 months. Voodoo2 was legendary, it didn't even support all contemporary APIs and was completely shut out within a year of release and by sheer force of will the community supported it until 2003/2004 (but it was not by any means competitive with anything after 1999, even in GLide games like Deus Ex where the GeForce2 just stomps SLI V2s.)

Some people are going to argue for the 8800 GTX on just a technology standpoint, but the reason why the 8800 GT holds its legendary status is because that was the first instance of NVIDIA beheading their own flagship with a cut-down and much cheaper card. 6% difference between the 8800 GT and GTX, very similar to the 4-5% between the 1080 Ti and Titan X Pascal.

 

[LabRat 891]

No. It could have been, though...

NVIDIA GP100 GPU Specs

3840 Cores, 240 TMUs, 96 ROPs

www.techpowerup.com

V64/VFEs and VIIs are still 'killin it' in smalltime(Individual/indie) AI/MI devwork
and
(while long outperformed,) sustain impressive minimum framerates for their age.

Pascal + HBM (in a consumer-facing offering) would've been a GPU for the ages.
OtOH, 1080ti is just 980tii: Electric Boogaloo.
Such a long-lasting performance, that nVidia decided they would never let their own (used) products ever threaten their sales, ever again. (+12VHPWR).

 

[agent_x007]

Pascal + HBM = Quadro P100 (REALLY expensive at the time)
OR
Pascal + HBM = ~Titan V (a little bit more tame, but still really expensive on launch)
^Depending how you see things from consumer perspective

 

[evernessince]

On the other hand, 2080 Ti offers:
• Ray tracing. You can touch it, you can see it, you can smell it. You can form your decision upon it and yes, 2080 Ti offers reasonable RT performance.

The 2080 Ti gets a whopping 38 FPS at 1080p in Alan Wake 2 with RT enabled. Maybe in your opinion that's reasonable but for the vast majority in the PC community it's not. It only gets worse as you look further down the 2000 series stack as well, 2080 Ti is best case scenario.

It was also completely overpriced, a ripoff. The 2080 Ti hardly competed with the 1080 Ti given the massive price difference. A better comparison is the 2080.

• DLSS. Might be considered overrated by some image quality elitists but overall, it's a much more solid performance booster than lowering your settings in other ways (lesser resolution feels funky, less detailed shadows also feel somewhat questionable). Also it's leagues ahead of XeSS and especially FSR.

DLSS was non-existent to a vaseline smear for a year 1/2 to two years after the 2000 series launch. If we are talking today, it's really not that important given the 1080 Ti can run FSR and XeSS. You are implying that people running these old cards are going to be pixel peeping when they are almost certainly already making visual compromises and likely don't care if one upscaler has slightly more artifacts. No one is going to sit there with a 1080 ti and say the 2080 Ti is worth the $1,200 because DLSS is slightly better than competitng upscalers. Most of them DGAF.

• More baseline performance. Which is just great despite the insane 1200+ dollar price tag.

A 16 - 25% performance increase (depending on res) isn't great. Factoring in price makes it a joke. 2000 series was one of the worst Nvidia generations, right up there with Fermi. Overpriced, power hungry, and zero price to performance improvement. It couldn't even do it's marquee feature well and there were zero decent uses of those features for a long time. I'm almost certain Nvidia was rushing to AI for enterprise and had to come up with reasons for gamers to buy it's cards after the fact given it's complete failure to have any meaningful implementations for a while after launch.

The reason the 1080 Ti and 1000 series was so great is because it was after that when Nvidia started pushing really hard to change customer expectations on what a GPU should cost. Not that they didn't do that with the 1000 and 900 series (like staggering the x80 and x80 Ti launches or price increases), they just did it to a much greater extent in later generations.


Is the 1080 Ti one of the GOATS? Yes

Is it the best GPUs ever? God I hope not because that implies that until the end of time there will never be a deal as good as the 1080 Ti, which honestly only appears so amazing because of the constant price hikes from Nvidia since then. People forget that the 1080 Ti and other 1000 series cards themselves were a price increase over the 900 series, the 1080 Ti was $50 more expensive than the 980 Ti as were many cards across the 1000 series stack. I had a 1080 Ti for a long time and it was way better value than what's on the market now but I'm not going to pretend as if it too was not part of Nvidia's shenangins in pushing up prices.

 

[Fouquin]

Pascal + HBM = Quadro P100 (REALLY expensive at the time)
OR
Pascal + HBM = ~Titan V (a little bit more tame, but still really expensive on launch)
^Depending how you see things from consumer perspective

Volta is architecturally Turing in SM design, not Pascal. I.E. Turing is just Volta with FP reduction and RT cores spliced in.

 

[Fokker]

Price to performance and performance vs what came after it, I would argue "yes". I still have a 1080Ti that was my main rig card for ~5 years and still delivers solid performance if you're not using RT (even at 4K). The 20 series was overpriced and underperformed in comparison and I couldn't justify upgrading until the 30 series came along. If you're gaming at less than 4K and don't care about RT, there's honestly no compulsion to upgrade if you already have one.

 

[agent_x007]

Volta is architecturally Turing in SM design, not Pascal. I.E. Turing is just Volta with FP reduction and RT cores spliced in.

True, but it doesn't do Turing things (like DLSS/Mesh Shaders/Hardware RT), so it's more like Pascal in that way

 

[LabRat 891]

True, but it doesn't do Turing things (like DLSS/Mesh Shaders/Hardware RT), so it's more like Pascal in that way

Proto-Turing?

 

[agent_x007]

Proto-Turing?

More like "Ultimate GTX"
Game feature wise, GTX 1660 Ti only get's Mesh Shaders over Titan V after all.