Image: Foundry
A long time ago in a consumer market not so far away, $700 could get you a top-of-the-line graphics card. Today, $750 (or more) only gets you Nvidia’s bronze medal card, the RTX 5070 Ti. But how does it compare to the GTX 1080 Ti, which launched at $700 in 2017 and is widely considered the greatest graphics card of all time? Adam and Will decided to find out in the latest PCWorld video on YouTube.
Eight years is an eternity in the graphics card space, so even though the 1080 Ti was the big daddy of its time, conventional wisdom says that it should pale in comparison to the 5070 Ti four generations later. And yeah, that bears out in the benchmark data. The newer card delivers approximately two-to-three times the FPS when gaming on an identical test bench, with some big drops in 1 percent lows. Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed a more-than-triple improvement on the 5070 Ti.
The 10-series was also the last one to use the GeForce GTX label, supplanted by GeForce RTX (with the “R” meaning “ray tracing”). And yeah, to no one’s surprise, ray tracing with Nvidia’s modern systems is basically impossible on the older card. And AI applications like text generation are better on the newer card by an order of magnitude, as Nvidia is all-in on dedicated AI hardware.
But it’s not all bad. At 1440p resolution, 2x upscaling, and high graphical settings, the 1080 Ti still managed to hit 60 frames per second on games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. That’s still a good gaming experience without ray tracing, especially if you bump some of those settings down to keep things smooth. Will says it’s “firmly in the playable camp,” even for intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077.
In other words, if you spent a ton on this card seven or eight years ago and you don’t need the latest and greatest, I’d say you’re fine to hang on to that aging 10-series card for another generation. For more fun comparisons on graphics cards, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube, and check out The Full Nerd podcast every week too.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he’s the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop “battlestation” in his off hours. Michael’s previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he’s covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he’s always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.
