It’s been ten years since the launch of the GTX 10-series line of NVIDIA graphics cards, which saw the release of the famous GTX 1080 Ti. Considered by many to be the GOAT (although the GTX 980 Ti deserves honorable mention), the GTX 1080 Ti brought powerful rasterized performance to a new level for PC users. Launched on May 6, 2016, the Pascal-based GPUs were the last before NVIDIA introduced its RTX lineup two years later with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. While 4K gaming was in its infancy, it didn’t stop NVIDIA from branding the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti as the ultimate 4K gaming experience.
“Step up to the ultimate 4K gaming experience with the GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti and enjoy today’s biggest games in amazing detail. With up to 2X the performance of previous generations, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti delivers immersive 4K graphics at a buttery-smooth 60 frames per second.”
– NVIDIA
This flagship card was released with an MSRP of $699, but would eventually become a victim of what is now the common practice of scalping products on the internet, with its price essentially doubled two years later when supply issues ensued. While many may believe it was COVID that triggered such things, there were many other factors in play before the pandemic, ranging from geopolitical to weather-related issues, such as flooding and droughts at semiconductor fab facilities.
Meanwhile, the GTX 10 series saw over two dozen GPU products released, spanning nearly every imaginable gaming tier level. SLI was still a thing, but had already largely been abandoned by game developers, so the days of pairing up two lower-cost cards to achieve high performance gains were mostly over. It was a bittersweet time for longtime NVIDIA users, but the aforementioned GTX 1080 Ti made up for that and paved the way for the future of PC gaming.