GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend in a Ray-Traced World
We revisited the legendary GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti by pairing them with both period-correct hardware and modern processors like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. While these Pascal cards still deliver a solid 1080p experience in many titles, they struggle significantly with modern ray tracing requirements and AI workloads. Our testing reveals that while the 1080 Ti remains a contender for older games, the lack of dedicated hardware for ray tracing and LLM inference signals it is time to hang up its jersey.
The GTX 1080 Ti is considered the GOAT, but is it showing its age? It's a ray-traced-large-language-model world out there in 2026, and it may be time for the 1080 Ti to hang up its jersey.
- tenacious_tuna
I'm still using a 1080ti in my main PC, though I don't play as many games as I used to. Control is the last title I picked up where I really felt like I was pushing the graphics capability of my rig.
I remember when I built my PC I was surprised when I'd come across a post of someone running ancient (at the time) chips like the i7-870, and now I'm realizing I am one of those people.
My 2700X and 1080ti do plenty of what I need these days. I meant to upgrade both a couple years ago but between job changes and then tariffs and whatnot it just never quite made sense to commit to the jump. I have a hard time imagining what an ideal upgrade would even be now with how expensive everything's gotten. I'm mostly hoping my machine continues to hold up for another couple years.
- fishgoesblub
It's amazing how great the 10 series was. The 1060, a budget card, had the same amount of VRAM as the previous generations top tier card (6GB) with the 1080Ti having 11GB! the 5060 for example has only 8GB, the same as the GTX 1070 and 1080.
- RavSS
My old 1080 Ti now sits inside a 4U rackmount server. It's an EVGA SC2 HYBRID version and I am still amazed that the AIO cooler hasn't failed yet or leaked everywhere. One of the best things I've purchased in retrospect since it was my main GPU up until the middle of 2025, even though at the time in 2017 I felt the price of 1.5k NZD was extreme.
- iammjm
Funny enough, I have the 1080 and I tested qwen 3.5 9b on it today. I was positively surprised with the experience. It's no Opus but it did OK on the couple of queries and tasks I gave it. It's pretty impressive for a 10 year old gpu!
- Argonaut998
Mine is still going strong, it can run Gemma 4 26b. It can still play all the games I care about at near max settings at 1440p at 60 FPS (like Elden Ring).#
My PC did coincidentally die today (not GPU related) so I think it's time for an upgrade, what do you recommend?