Hi all, might be a long post, but if you have/had a 1080ti or you experience pc gaming in the 90s… maybe we share a thing or two.
I was born in 1985, at 6 my mother brought home an olivetti pc, with a 4MB (i think) external harddrive as big as a pc case and a green phosphor display. i've played space invaders (spacein.exe) and the digger.
After a year or two i saw in a computer store… doom. it was time for an upgrade, so a 486dx2 came, with it's turbo button. i played doom, monkey and other lucasarts games, street fighter turbo and gta (yes… gta 1). but then tomb raider (that i played at 320×240, software rendering, 640×480 gave me like 5fps), quake 1, carmageddon and wipeout came out… my pc was already old.
So it came a pentium 2 with a 3dfx voodoo 2 and man… i could play playstation games on pc, but was short lived…
Quake 3 came out… time for and upgrade i guess… Pentium 3 and the first geforce 256. Played a lot on that pc, lost so much time in max payne. But ever that pc was short lived, so many games where "too new" for the hardware.
After that there was a athlon x2 (first dual core) and a geforce 6800. Was top of the line… for 12 months, then crysis came out and it was over… core duo and geforce 8800 were miles head.
And finally in 2017 i decided to go back in the pc world and build this:
Ryzen 1700, x370 taichi, 32gb of ddr4 3600 AND… a 1080ti.
And man… times had changed.
The 1080ti is a thing of the past, when GPU maker actually made GRAPHICS CARD. She's been amazing, even on my 3440×1440 display, even today, she's amazing. In 9 (NINE) years i've struggle to find a game that she didn't like (FSR 3 came to help). She also repaid herself by mining some BTC in the 2018 craze.
And switching to a 5800x3d gave her a new life 3 years ago.
Never in my life i would have thought i would be able to play anything that came out with the same card/hardware for… 9 years!
I will remember her as a statement of what you can do with todays tech if you care about the (gaming) performance and you don't want to compromise… 11GB of ram (NINE years ago), amazing power delivery, no bullshit factory imposed power limit, no stupid power connector.
10 series was the end of the GPU philosophy from the 90s in my opinion. First came the crypto crazy, now it's ia.
Anyway i've upgraded to a 5070ti, wanted to have dlss and try ray tracing in cyberpunk, also a few games was starting to run … well not amazingly (but still… they run).
So it's finally time to retire, my baby, thanks for all the polygons and texture you've shown me, thanks for the 100s fps you gave me, and thanks for being the best card i've ever had. You will be remembered.
Farewell.