Is the GTX 1080 Ti still worth buying?

The second generation of RTX cards are here, or not quite thanks to scalpers. I recently did a video looking back at the RTX 2080 Ti, so check that out if you haven't already, but what we'll be looking at today is the last generation of the GTX flagship card, the GTX 1080 Ti. Is it worth buying? Is it worth looking at? Is it worth keeping? Let's find out. I've actually had this card in my main machine for 18 months now, and I didn't replace it with the 2080 Ti. The 2080 Ti is actually in my SimRig PC, and I guess that kind of says a lot about the card if it's still in my main system and I haven't felt the need to upgrade. So yeah, for £350, is it really worth it? Of course there are no RT or Tensor cores, so if you're doing ray tracing, not real time, such as with Blender, you're not going to be able to use that functionality. Likewise, RTX is not on and cannot be put on. If you try to real time ray trace with this thing, I guarantee you're not going to do very well with it. This also means no DLSS 2 support, so no upscaling like crazy frame rates from 1080p to Ultra HD, anything like that. That is reserved for the RTX cards. For some context, here are the specs compared with the RTX 2080 Ti, which is the next one up, and the RTX 3090, because despite the naming scheme, it is actually where the Ti would have sat before. Maybe NVIDIA will introduce some kind of 3080 Ti, but then that kind of messes up the naming schemes if they bring in a second generation Titan RTX. Yeah, naming schemes for tech in general are just awful, so I don't know. For now, it does fit that Ti gap where there isn't a Ti in this current generation. It's actually crazy to think that all three of these cards are in the same performance sector, at least on the release, because the specs and the overall throughput are just completely out of whack. They are so different. Obviously, going from the 780 Ti to the 980 Ti wasn't a huge jump, but from the 980 Ti onwards is kind of nuts. So the 1080 Ti, when it came out, was an absolute beast and was really made for high resolutions, you know, Quad HD, Wide Quad HD and Ultra HD. After playing with it for, you know, 18 months, I found that Ultra HD really isn't its forte. It's not quite built for that, and I think that the RTX 30 cards do a better job of Ultra HD gaming. But what I found this card kind of likes is Quad HD, like high quality settings, Quad HD and Quad HD Wide, which is why I did all of my testing on the 3440 by 1440 resolution of which my main monitor is. It's only 60 Hertz, so I mean, it's not going to matter when it comes to the actual benchmarks, but I'm looking for something that's going to saturate 60 Hertz on this panel here. Of course, it's got 11 gigabytes of VRAM, which is plenty of VRAM for that kind of resolution and plenty for, you know, video edit, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Lightroom. Those are the apps that I use for my job and I use this machine for. They seem to work just fine, so I wouldn't consider that to be a poor point whatsoever. 11 gigs is actually one more than 3080, which has 10 gigabytes of buffer, so there's actually more there. Of course, it's not as fast and everything like that. And to give full transparency, the test bench is an 8700K i7. That's a couple of generations old at this point, but I imagine if you're looking for a used graphics card, you've probably got a used PC in general. So that's kind of how I imagine they'd fit together. 32 gigabytes of 3000 megahertz memory, as well as an EVGA 850 watt power supply, which I know is overkill, but it is something that I got on a deal, so I thought it would sit nicely in there. And all the games are run off of a Kingston NVMe SSD that's actually on the board itself. What I'm going to do now is leave you with the numbers. I tested a myriad of different titles, ones that I think kind of It's a good graphics card, good quality graphics card. Through my testing, I did find that maybe the wide quad HD isn't as good as I thought it was. Maybe I was just thinking too kind of optimistically about that. Some of the offerings are happily over 60 FPS, some are quite a lot higher than that, 100 FPS, and some dip below that, like Control is quite a demanding title. So it's all going to depend on what games you use, what games you play, and your settings. So I set a lot of mine from medium to high because that's where I imagined they would sit quite comfortably, and they do. If I was going to be more competitive on something like this, then maybe I'd drop the settings down to a medium. And yeah, I just find in general that it's able to run most games pretty well. It does struggle with shaders in Minecraft and stuff like that when you're really pushing it, but I found that for wide quad HD gaming, it's pretty good. Now, one thing that I did think about going into this, I don't have a quad HD like a standard 16 by 9 quad HD monitor here, but that's significantly less resolution, and I feel like that's going to run much better. And if you're someone who for some reason still games at 1080p and still has something like a 1080 Ti, it's going to run games absolutely flawlessly because a 1080 Ti is a beast for 1080p. God, that's a bit of a weird one. So if you do game at 1080p, 1080 Ti is going to be more than enough, unless you want RTX. Is it still a beast? I would consider it, yes. But here's the thing, here's a bit of a caveat, and this is going to change depending on the market, depending on the time you actually watch this video. This card dropped to around £320-ish on eBay not long after the 3000 series was announced. And ever since then, it's kind of been climbing back up as all GPU pricing has done since, well, the scalpers really introduced themselves. It's not just the 20 series and 30 series that are being affected, it's actually older cards as well. So this thing is creeping up more towards like the £400 mark. And in my opinion, for that, you know, it's getting pretty close to the 3070, which would wipe the floor with this, but also the 3070 isn't very available. In this current market, I feel like if you were paying somewhere around the region of £250-300 for this graphics card, you're getting a good deal. However, you know, it's hard to say because so many of these cards are just not available and it really does suck. It's something that's actually annoyed me, not because I'm looking to buy a new graphics card or anything, but like I see so many people who are building new computers or like just building a computer for the first time, and they have to resort to tech that came out like two years ago or a year and a half ago because, you know, the modern stuff is just not available. It's really frustrating. But as I said, in the start of the video, I will continue to use this 1080Ti in my main machine until it goes kaput, which is hopefully, you know, a long way away from now. In fact, if you don't want to hear about my personal setup, then leave the video now. But I just had a thought like recently that my main PC has an 8700K and a 1080Ti and these are two plus three plus year old parts. And I don't really feel the need to upgrade. I'm not saying like, oh, well, now they are the best parts ever. You know, you can tell there are stutters in some games and it doesn't run as flawlessly as some might want. But I just feel like modern tech, I mean, it's not as interesting or as exciting as maybe it once was. And especially with stuff like scalping where, you know, you can't even get these crazy deals because you're spending over a grand on a graphics card that would go into retail for 700 anyway. It just doesn't feel like a fun thing to invest in. So yeah, maybe, let me know in the comments, if you're still watching this and you like hold on to a piece of tech for maybe longer than you might have previously, let me know. Same story with my iPhone 11. I've used it for almost a year and a half now. And the last time I had a phone for more than six months was, I don't know, five, six years ago. So, and obviously that's because I'm a phone reviewer, but even still, you know, I'm still a phone reviewer, but I'm holding on to a phone for, you know, maybe even two years. So it's kind of strange how tech has progressed or maybe de-gressed, is that a word? Regressed with me. But yeah, anyway, I'd like to give a massive thanks to my patrons. You guys are awesome for being continually supportive. And whilst you're here, please do hit like, dislike, comment, subscribe if you're new around here and miss a video like this one. I've been Ryan Thomas and I'll catch you later. Peace.