Bruno Ferreira Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
ezst036 Planned obsolescence strikes again. Sad. Many of these cards are still plenty fast and usable, serving their owners well to this day. Reply
Joomsy ezst036 said: Planned obsolescence strikes again. Sad. Many of these cards are still plenty fast and usable, serving their owners well to this day. Did you not read the article? This doesn't mean these cards are going to outright cease to function. It just means they're no longer going to receive feature updates through the proprietary driver. They will continue to receive security updates for another three years, though. Your take also disregards the work being done to make NVK+Nouveau viable enough to make the proprietary driver unnecessary. These cards will more than likely get their feature updates through that, which is what gives Linux a pretty good edge over Windows. Also, an OEM supporting a device like this for over a decade is not common. They had a good run. They have to be sunsetted at some point, and it's not like RTX 20s and 30s are prohibitively expensive these days. Reply
bit_user Just replaced my GTX 980 Ti, last week! Got a RTX 5070 for about the same $$$ that I paid ($480, since the 10-series had already been announced when I got my 980 Ti) with twice the VRAM capacity and bandwidth and like 8x the compute performance at about the same power consumption. I hope this new card can also last me 9 years, but we'll see! Fun fact: the main reason I went with Nvidia, 9 years ago, was that I was still using analog CRTs and AMD had dropped VGA support by that point. The GTX 900-series was Nvidia's last product line to have it! I wonder if that could have anything to do with why they supported it so long? Reply
Bubba Jones ezst036 said: Planned obsolescence strikes again. Sad. Many of these cards are still plenty fast and usable, serving their owners well to this day. A 1080Ti is completely obsolete, eclipsed by cards now more or less e-waste, or available for peanuts. Hanging onto a 1080 into the mid-2020's is simply ludicrous. Reply
bit_user Bubba Jones said: A 1080Ti is completely obsolete, eclipsed by cards now more or less e-waste, or available for peanuts. Hanging onto a 1080 into the mid-2020's is simply ludicrous. It idles about as low as much newer cards: Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-gtx-1080-ti-sc2/29.html It's still fine for casual games or many non-gaming uses. That's why I kept my GTX 980 Ti for as long as I did. Because it just kept doing what I currently needed it to do, even after I upgraded my monitors. Granted, my needs did shift over the course of my owning it. I no longer need a card that's at that same point in the performance curve, which is why I was happy to replace it with "only" a RTX 5070. Reply
Ogotai Bubba Jones said: Hanging onto a 1080 into the mid-2020's is simply ludicrous. so are the prices for a new vid cards, when some one has other things to spend their money on that is more important Reply
Bubba Jones bit_user said: It idles about as low as much newer cards: Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-gtx-1080-ti-sc2/29.html It's still fine for casual games or many non-gaming uses. That's why I kept my GTX 980 Ti for as long as I did. Because it just kept doing what I currently needed it to do, even after I upgraded my monitors. Granted, my needs did shift over the course of my owning it. I no longer need a card that's at that same point in the performance curve, which is why I was happy to replace it with "only" a RTX 5070. When a basic 4060 will match a 1080Ti and offers DLSS, etc. hanging onto a 1080Ti is simply insane. Also, WFT does idle power have to do with anything ? The 1080Ti was a power-hog under load. There are much better cards that are nowhere near as ancient, like a 2070 Super, etc. and can be had for relative peanuts. Just because it can "work" does not mean that it is practical, or reasonable, in that task any more. GPUs are pretty much the only PC components that are very "time-sensitive"; even "old" CPUs (say, 8th-gen Intel, early Ryzen) have a minimal effect on system performance with a mid-range GPU, but correspondingly, an old GPU will be severely limiting. Far too many people hang on to old GPUs too long, to the point where they are literal e-waste, compromising their experience for absolutely no valid reason. You're always better off leveraging retained value before the market for them complete collapses (like now, when the drivers will stop support) To be clear, the idea that you buy a flagship GPU and then "upgrade" 10 years later is patently insane. Sell your old GPU, and incrementally move up the food-chain to newer (NOT: "NEW") tech for relative peanuts. Do this every three years or so and you won't be stuck with e-waste. Reply
Bubba Jones Ogotai said: so are the prices for a new vid cards, when some one has other things to spend their money on that is more important If you're running a 1080Ti, you could also run a 2080, 3060Ti, whatever. It's sheer stupidity to sit on a "flagship" for a decade when it becomes more or less obsolete in less than two generations. Used 3060Ti's have been cheap for a long time now, so sitting on a 1080Ti is simply stupid. Reply
bit_user Bubba Jones said: When a basic 4060 will match a 1080Ti and offers DLSS, etc. hanging onto a 1080Ti is simply insane. If you're a gamer. However, if you don't have very stringent requirements for your GPU, then it's cheaper to hang on to the one you have while it still meets your needs. Bubba Jones said: Also, WFT does idle power have to do with anything ? The 1080Ti was a power-hog under load. Well, if newer cards had lower idle power, then there could be an argument that even if you're not using it to play games, that upgrading could offset the cost of doing so by lower energy consumption & air conditioning costs. Bubba Jones said: There are much better cards that are nowhere near as ancient, like a 2070 Super, etc. and can be had for relative peanuts. By skipping several generations of "peanuts" upgrades, I saved enough to buy a much better card than those. Bubba Jones said: GPUs are pretty much the only PC components that are very "time-sensitive"; even "old" CPUs (say, 8th-gen Intel, early Ryzen) have a minimal effect on system performance with a mid-range GPU, but correspondingly, an old GPU will be severely limiting. I disagree. You appear to be looking at this from a purely gaming perspective. I spend a lot of time waiting for code to compile, where the gains in recent generations of CPUs have really been a godsend! Bubba Jones said: Far too many people hang on to old GPUs too long, to the point where they are literal e-waste, compromising their experience for absolutely no valid reason. My GTX 980 Ti still meets my daily needs. I'm replacing it because, when I have time to dabble with graphics programming again, I want something with decent ray tracing performance. Neural shaders is another fertile area of exploration. Bubba Jones said: To be clear, the idea that you buy a flagship GPU and then "upgrade" 10 years later is patently insane. 9 years, and I stopped needing a flagship GPU, in the meantime. That's why I replaced it with only a RTX 5070, which should last me another good, long while. Maybe I'll happen upon a use case for something much more powerful, but that's a bridge I'll cross when I come to it. By not spending too much now, I'll be in a better position to upgrade in the RTX 60 or RTX 70 generations, should I want to. BTW, I briefly toyed with the idea of upgrading to a 12 GB RTX 3080, when the GPU market collapsed at the end of 2022. However, I didn't find quite the deal I was looking for and didn't expect the RTX 40 generation to offer such an unappetizing value proposition. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/geforce-590-driver-branch-is-the-first-without-feature-support-for-gtx-9-and-10-series-gpus-linux-release-marks-the-end-of-the-line-for-graphics-cards-that-defined-an-era#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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- Get a 9800X3D and RX 9070 XT prebuilt gaming PC for just $2,199 — Skytech's hi-spec offering also comes with 2TB of SSD storage and 32GB of DDR5
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.