It has been two years since Nvidia debuted the first processor of their current 10-series gaming graphics cards. The first Graphics card in the series was named Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 that was the best graphics card to buy both regarding price and productivity at that time, later the crown shifted to the newer GTX 1080Ti.
Nonetheless, the GTX 1080 had enough resources up its sleeves to carry itself in the ups and downs of the market. It was one of those cards that were most affected by mining; its price nearly doubled at the start of 2018. Since the prices are tamed now, and Nvidia’s CEO said that the next generation is a long time from now, at Computex 18, it is the best time to revisit this wonderful card after two years since it was announced, to see how it performs in 2018 and its prospects.
Specifications
Starting with the specifications of the card, at the time of release, these were the best set of hardware that was superseded by its better version the GTX 1080Ti. Based on the new Pascal architecture and 16nm FinFet process, it saw a 40% performance boost over Maxwell’s graphics cards. It has 256-bit interfaced 8GB DDR5X memory that is clocked at 10000Mhz making the memory bandwidth 10 Gbps.
The GP 104 GPU has the base clock speed of 1607Mhz while it goes to 1733Mhz at boost mode, the CUDA core count of this card is 2560 complemented by 160 Texture unit making the transistor count 7.2 billion. The price of this Graphics card had a lot fluctuation, the price at launch was $549, it was close to $800 during mining times while now it is retailing at a price comparable to its MSRP. Here is the link of our article for more details about how the prices of major Graphics cards have changed.
From now on this article will compare its performance at the time of its release that is in 2016 with performance in 2017 and lastly the performance to expect in the near future.
2016
At the time of launch GTX 1080 was way ahead of the competition, the last gen flagship GTX 980 can perform well in the AAA titles that were released in 2016 such as DOOM, Dark Souls 3 and Titanfall 2, but the GTX 1080 was released to provide 4k gaming performance at a playable rate at that time.
As the card was marketed towards the high-end consumers, it was meant for a high- end gaming PC thus justifying its high-power usage. In case of 1080p (FHD) and 1440p (QHD) performance it makes even the GTX 980Ti SLI an archaic pair, while the 4k performance is very good at the same time, it managed to get close to 60FPS in current AAA titles like Dark Souls 3 at maxed settings, the slightly older games like Battlefield 4, were a piece of cake for this card, it got close to 70 FPS at high settings in 4k. While it trailed just behind at around 60 FPS in more demanding games like The Rise of the Tomb Raider, but the experience with HDR output was immaculate.
2017
The year 2017 was the best year as far as the games are concerned, we got the much-awaited sequels of many hit games. The games had their incremental graphical advantage over the games of the last year but last year’s flagship GPU from Nvidia GTX 1080 was able to blast through these games at the highest setting possible. While the 1080p and 1440p performance was not changed a bit, the 4k performance had taken some toll with the framerates going down to mid-twenties for the demanding titles and mid-thirties for the less demanding titles at highest possible settings. For example, the more demanding game like Shadow of War was stumbling at 4k ultra setting with framerates averaging at around 24, while the HDR capable Resident Evil 7 got around 40 FPS at the same settings.
What to expect in 2018,2019
Reiterating the statement of Nvidia’s CEO “It is (The next-gen) a long time from now,” Nvidia is not interested in retiring its 10-series cards any time soon, but the chains of rumors in not stopping we have compiled the rumors around this here. 2018 has been rather quiet until now, we only had a handful of games that were released in the first half of this year, most of which were console exclusives while the games that were released for PC gave a tough time to the 2-year-old veteran graphics card at 4k ultra settings, it can run these games, i.e., Vampyr requires a GTX 1080 to run the game at 1440p ultra settings with framerates above than 60, on the other hand it stumbles at 4k high, at 4k medium it seems to handle the game well.
Verdict
With the advancement of technologies, the games are becoming more and more graphics intensive, that require more raw power from the graphics card. The GTX 1080 that was intended for 4k gaming is now capable of playing games at QHD resolution, it can run the less demanding games at 4k, but it stumbles at the heavyweight titles.
