Let’s see how well the legendary 1080Ti can play some of the most recent games if you can accept lower settings and maybe, ewww, upscaling. A couple of weeks back we saw that it was banging out impeccable results at high settings up until about 2023 or 2024ish, at least at 1080p, so let’s bring that testing up to the current day.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see how many new tricks we can teach the old dog.
The 1080Ti has shown incredible staying power, and at least at the 1080p resolution that my capture card limits me to it was crushing games at high settings for five or six years after it launched.
Later games started giving sub sixty average fps, and while that’s not necessarily a deal breaker, let’s see what measures we need to take to get closer to that target. I had contemplated playing around with using a separate video card and the LSFG app to see if its independent approach to upscaling and frame generation would be helpful, but the games that need those crutches already have them built in. Maybe I’ll keep that idea around for getting more life out of a weaker card with older games that don’t have that tech built into them, and today we will not denigrate the majesty of the 1080Ti with such sacrilege.
I’m expecting we’ll see more issues with games released after the 1080Ti stopped getting driver support from Nvidia, so there may be bugs or just a lack of optimisation that affects performance. Where a game can recommend its own preferred settings, I’ll start from there, otherwise I’ll rely on our good friends trial and error.
First off, we’re journeying back to 2023 for Starfield. At high settings with all the upscaling off we got 49 average fps, with 1% lows of 33, and 0.1% lows of 4 fps. After some fiddling about, I’ve settled on dropping to medium settings, which has dropped to a 50% render resolution with FSR3 upscaling. This is now giving us 60 average fps with 1% lows of 50 and 0.1% lows of 40 fps while in the fairly demanding city of Jemison, but if we go out in the less densely populated bits of the planet and bother some wildlife which is more like how the actual action parts of this game are, we’re getting an average of 66 fps, with 1% lows of 55 and 0.1% lows of 45 fps. I played through all of this on a 1080Ti back in the day so it can handle this game fine.
Previously Immortals of Aveum at High settings with FSR disabled came pretty close to our target with 56 average fps, getting 1% lows of 32 and 0.1% lows of 14 fps. It doesn’t require too much tweaking, where at mostly Low settings, but Ultra quality textures boosts us to an average of 64 fps with 1% lows of 42 and 0.1% lows of 38 fps. It takes a bit more of a visual hit than I’d like for some things, like this blue magic ribbon whatsit which looks well jank, but in raw performance terms it’s a very solid step up in consistency, if not maximum framerate.
Last time, we had Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora running at High settings, with no upscaling or framegen giving us 48 average fps with 1% lows of 31 and 0.1% lows of 26 fps. Dropping to the Medium preset, but with the shadows and reflection settings dropped a little further and the terrain texture quality increased maintains a pretty nice-looking world, to me not noticeably worse than the High settings. This gets us up to 59 average fps and improves the 1% lows to 45 and the 0.1% lows to 37 fps, which is pretty good by my standards.
It was at this point that I remembered overclocking was a thing that could be meaningfully done with this generation of cards, as they generally don’t automatically push themselves quite as fast as they could, unlike today’s cards which are generally tuned close to their limits out of the box. I’d refreshed the thermal paste in anticipation of goosing the power limits a bit, and while I was getting stable-ish higher clocks in Furmark, it wasn’t so happy in Alan Wake 2. I’ve settled on +250Mhz on the memory clocks, sitting at 5760Mhz, and +75Mhz on the core, which has it sitting at 1974Mhz or thereabouts in game. That’s close enough to the 2GHz clocks these cards were routinely being pushed to at launch to keep me happy, I’m sure there’s been a bit of silicon degradation in the past nine years. This can come at a cost of about 300W of power draw, although temperatures are reasonable at about 73 deg C max, and both metrics are frequently much lower in game.
Alan Wake 2 at 60 fps is maybe a stretch too far for the 1080Ti, but I’ve given it a shot. Previously at High settings, with no upscaling we were at 35 average fps, with 1% lows of 26, and 0.1% lows of 18 fps. Medium Settings gives much the same average fps, but with some improvements in the 1% and 0.1% lows to 32 and 25 fps. Taking some extreme measures with Low settings gets us up to 46 average fps, 1% lows of 36 and 0.1% lows of 34 fps.
Arguably, there’s better results from using FSR quality upscaling, which will be rendering at 720p resolution and upscaling to 1080p. Going back up to medium settings, we get similar but slightly better results to native resolution Low settings with 48 average fps, and 1% lows of 41 and 0.1% of 35 fps. I think either of those are as good as we’re going to get without completely tanking the visuals.
For example, here’s Balanced FSR mode, so upscaled from 1129×635, at mostly medium settings with some shadow detail turned down, where again we’re getting another very slight performance bump to 51 average fps, with 1% lows of 41 and 0.1% lows of 39 fps, but visually this is a bridge too far for my tastes. I think for this style of game I prefer it to look prettier with a lower framerate, but you do you, King.
2024 was certainly beyond the 1080Ti at High settings, with Unreal Engine 5 heralding its end times. Here’s our old friend the Black Myth: Wukong benchmark, where at 1080p High settings, without any RT or upscaling, it gave us 38 average fps. It would like us to use frame generation but ignoring that and otherwise accepting its recommended Medium settings with 66% FSR gets us up to a reasonable 73 average fps.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was doing a bit better than I thought it would at the start of the game, with High settings and at native resolution getting 42 average fps, with 1% lows of 27, and 0.1% lows of 20 fps. Dropping to all the way to Low settings with balanced FSR, so a 58% render resolution gives us an average fps of 85, with 1% lows at 65 and 0.1% lows of 50 fps, so there’s maybe room to make this look a bit prettier at the expense of frametime consistency, but at any rate we’re going to get a playable experience on the 1080Ti.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II at High settings and native resolution looks fabulous but runs cinematically, getting only 30 average fps, with 1% lows of 23 and 0.1% lows of 18 fps. Dropping to Medium settings with Balanced FSR gets us to 76 average fps, with great 1% lows of 61 and 0.1% lows of 43 fps so this engine’s a lot more scalable than I expected. The drop in settings quality doesn’t seem to have hurt the presentation all that much so I’d be happy to play with this, but I think there’s also scope to goose the settings up a bit if you so desire.
Into the unknown with some of 2025’s games next. Silent Hill f recommends its Balanced preset, which is still mostly high settings. Getting an accurate idea of its true performance is a bit challenging as it keeps dropping to a 30 fps cap during the many in-engine cutscenes that pepper the gameplay. My best estimate is that we’re getting an average of 58 fps running around the town, with 1% lows of 46 and 0.1% lows of 37 fps, and maybe 10 fps lower in the earliest area with the more extravagant views. At any rate, I expect no problems getting through this on a 1080Ti.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater next, where at High settings with balanced FSR it’s recommending a 3080. A 1080Ti is close enough, right? It takes a while to get to the actual gameplay – Kojima loves him some cutscenes – but we eventually get an average of 41 fps, with 1% lows of 30 and 0.1% lows of 23 fps, which is fine by me. If you favour consistency over looks, dropping to Low settings, again with Balanced FSR, gives an average of 60 fps, the game’s framerate cap, with 1% lows of 52 and 0.1% lows of 45 fps. Either way, there’s plenty of room to get a great experience out of this game.
Doom: The Dark Ages is our first unambiguous womp womp of the bunch, with it simply not launching unless there’s ray tracing capable hardware, at least on the Steam version. I understand there might be a way to launch it with the Windows Store version, which sounds like a bug and by all accounts doesn’t give a great experience. Still, as someone who played through the shareware release of Quake on a 486 DX2 66 in a postage stamp sized window, I’d rather I was able to make the determination of playability, not the computer. Disappointing.
Moving on to 2026, which as I’m recording is the most recent product from Causality Incorporated. This of course is Resident Evil Requiem, where I’m using its “Prioritise quality” preset, which seems to be mostly Normal settings, and I’m running with upscaling off.
Walking the rainy streets at the start of the game gets us 61 average fps, with 1% lows of 28 and 0.1% lows of 26 fps, which seems okay, and performance improves greatly in the enclosed areas of the hotel where we’re getting 96 average fps, with 1% lows of 35 and 0.1% lows of 33 fps.
We return to the more demanding streets a little later when our old mate Leon shows up with his hand cannon, and while capping these zomboids we get an average of 53 fps, 1% lows of 28 and 0.1% lows of 26 fps, so I’d say it’s able to cope with this game absolutely fine.
Triple A Walking simulator Death Stranding 2 suggested Medium settings, with quality FSR upscaling. I turned the recommended dynamic resolution scaling off, because no thank you, and in the opening sequence across these quite pretty ridges we’re getting 86 average fps., with stable 1% lows of 73 and 0.1% lows of 71 fps. I expect this isn’t the most demanding area of the game, but did I mention that Kojima loves him some cutscenes, and I wanted to get this video out this year. Regardless, there’s enough headroom at medium settings for me to be reasonably confident that the 1080Ti can handle any action that we might reach at some point in the distant future.
I was initially quite pleased with Forza Horizon 6, having heard there were some problems with it. Indeed, it tells you itself on launch. It quite happily got through a few benchmark runs, where at its recommended 1080p Medium settings, but with TAA off, it returned 85 average fps. That was good enough for me to push it to High settings where it gets 73 average fps, and it took going up to Ultra settings to drop below our target, getting 54 fps.
Trying the game proper at High settings, and for a while I though my only problem would be these character models that appear to have escaped from a PlayStation 2. In the early stage actual racing, we’re getting 87 average fps, with 1% lows of 73 and 0.1% lows of 66 fps. Which all seemed very playable indeed, until it repeatedly crashed out with a generic GPU error, and there’s not all that much that can be done about it as far as I can tell, bringing our excursion to Japan to an abrupt and premature end.
So, where does that leave us? Overall, even with the 1080Ti being left behind in terms of driver support, it’s clearly not going gentle into that good night. Let’s not sugar coat it though, in the games that worked, the performance we’re seeing is not what I’d call an 80-class experience, but it is still very playable, coming up for a decade later. That, friendos, is some proper rage against the dying of the light.
Of course the primary annoyance here is that the 1080Ti is pretty clearly still able to play the vast bulk of the latest games acceptably, or rather it would be able to, if it hadn’t been kneecapped by NVidia’s driver support ending. This is particularly annoying in Forza Horizon 6 which would clearly play really well, if not for crashing out due to not having the fixes found in the newer drivers.
On one level, I get it. The 1080Ti’s nearly a decade old. There’s limits to what’s realistic to expect from companies for support. For example I wouldn’t have expected 3dfx to still be supporting the Voodoo2 in 2007, and not just because they’d have been defunct for 5 years by that point. The difference, of course, is that I’m pretty sure the Voodoo2 could not in fact run Crysis, or Bioshock, or Modern Warfare, or the rest of 2007’s demanding titles. I don’t think it would have been architecturally possible, but we’ve very much proven that’s not really the case with the 1080Ti.
I think Nvidia are making the counter case, that in fact ray tracing is so vital to modern gaming that the 1080Ti and it’s Pascal brethren are indeed obsolete, and the Doom – The Dark Ages has the correct idea. Let’s just politely say I do not think that most gamers would agree with them, because otherwise I’ll be ranting about it for another half hour.
Likewise, it’s hard to defend Nvidia on the basis of them desperately needing to free up resources to allow them to move forward and compete. They are at the moment printing their own money, and if they had any PR nous extending support for older cards seems like a cheap and easy win, but, well, Nvidia has shown for years now that it very much does not care about their gaming customers and would very much rather be selling to datacentres.
I don’t think this is actually forced obsolescence, in the traditional sense at least. Nvidia aren’t deliberately hobbling older cards to force a purchase of a new one. It’s arguably worse. Nvidia are instead at best completely indifferent to the consumer market and don’t care if you buy a new card from them or not, because they make more money from datacentre purchases. Indeed, at worst, they’d rather not have a consumer division at all, as it’s a distraction from the more lucrative sectors.
Well, this is all heading towards another rant about AI and bubbles and so on, but let’s head that off at the pass and focus on the positives. We’ve looked at the 1080Ti in a lot of modern games and found that it’s still giving very playable results with very decent graphical fidelity in the vast bulk of them, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s still maintaining its reputation as a graphics card of legendary status.
I will eventually get round to pointlessly running two of them in SLI, but until then, if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.