Comment by formerly_proven
10 hours ago
I used my 1080 Ti for about eight years. The successor GPU is in some ways way faster (raytracing, AI features etc.), but in others really quite stagnant considering the huge stretch of time that passed between them. ~10 years for 2-3x performance in GPUs at higher nominal and real price points shows how slow silicon advances have been compared to the 90s and 2000s. The same period from 2000 to 2010 would've seen 1000x performance if not more. The difference between a 1080 Ti and a more expensive RTX 50 card is the RTX can render ideally triple the frames in synthetic benchmarks, double the frames in some rasterizing games (most games won't see gains that high), and do a few relatively tame raytracing tricks at performance which is still not really good. At the same throughput it consumes maybe half the power or a bit less. The difference between a GeForce 2 and e.g a Radeon HD 4k is several planes of existence.
My 1080ti is still working away in my kid's PC. If you connect a 1080p monitor, it will still hit 60fps in mostly everything.
The only thing that holds this card back now is a handful of titles that will not run unless ray-tracing support present on card - Indiana Jones and The Great Circle springs to mind etc.
I am very likely going to get a decade of use out of it across three different builds, one of the best technology investments I've ever made.
It really is an impressive bit of hardware. I finally pulled it out of my last system a year ago, but it was definitely holding its own up until that point.
Well. The 5090ti is significantly faster than a 1080ti. It has 92b vs 12b transistors. That's the 10 years difference you mention. 10 years before the 1080ti we had the 8800 ultra with 600m transistors. So yeah you are a bit right. But stacked transistors in the future might become reality and enable transistor increase again.
A 5090 is more than twice as expensive as a 1080 Ti in real MSRP terms and way more than that in actual real terms, since the 1080 Ti was available for some time below MSRP, while the 5090 realistically never was and usually goes for 50-100% above MSRP. So I don't think these can be compared. Basically a similar story with the 5080, it's significantly more expensive in real terms (and about ~2x in nominal terms).
The 5070 Ti would be the same spot.
If you compare these - the RTX 50 card has a bit higher TDP (which it will usually not reach due to clock limits), is a roughly 100mm² smaller die with around 4x the transistors and about 3x the compute (since much more of the chip is disabled compared to the 1080 Ti's chip). It has 5 GB more memory (11->16) and a lot more bandwidth.