It appears that EVGA is trying to get rid of its remaining stock of NVIDIA’s Pascal-generation flagship, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Various B-Stock models, which include the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition GAMING and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 DT GAMING, are on sale for the relatively low price of $349.99. That happens to be half the price that the legendary graphics card debuted at way back in March 2017.
This seems like a pretty cool deal for a GPU that can still power through today’s titles at lower resolutions (e.g., 1440p), even at their maximum graphics presets, but EVGA’s fire sale has made us wonder: how many of you would actually buy a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in the current year?
The idea seems peculiar, being that plenty of alternatives are available on the market with superior feature sets. While the Pascal generation has since been blessed with ray-tracing capabilities, it lacks other great benefits such as NVIDIA’s deep learning super sampling technology, DLSS, which is exclusive to the RTX family of GPUs. The inevitable advent of the RTX 30 Series’s weaker but cheaper models (e.g., GeForce RTX 3060) is also sure to hammer down the remaining value of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti even further.
On the other hand, EVGA’s $349 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards look pretty decent when you consider how much their closest modern counterparts (e.g., GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER) are still going for on the market. The majority of these seem to be priced in the $500 to $1,000 range, which is a definite premium over EVGA’s offers.
During NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series announcement, CEO Jensen Huang told his “Pascal friends” that it was definitely time to upgrade. Was he right?
“The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA’s new flagship gaming GPU, based on the NVIDIA Pascal architecture,” NVIDIA wrote at the time. “The latest addition to the ultimate gaming platform, this card is packed with extreme gaming horsepower, next-gen 11 Gbps GDDR5X memory, and a massive 11 GB frame buffer.”