This may come as a shock to some, but yes, it’s already been 10 years since the GTX 1080 hit the market… Well, it’s been 10 years and one day, so we’re a little late. In any case, on May 6, 2016, NVIDIA launched its GTX 1080, one of the brand’s most successful cards, offering major performance improvements over the previous generation, while keeping power consumption under control!
GTX 1080: already 10 years old!
Old-school GPUs:
10 years ago, graphics cards were made the old-fashioned way. For the most part, there were no upscaling technologies or other gimmicks to artificially boost performance. Indeed, games were rendered in their native resolution, there was no AI or ray tracing. Progress was made by improving in-game FPS while keeping card power consumption under control.
This is precisely what the Chameleon succeeded in doing with its new generation of GTX 10s. With this first 1080 (a Ti followed), the Chameleon offered an extraordinarily high-performance card for its time. It outperformed the GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX Titan X and even the SLI of the GTX 970. A single-GPU card outperformed two mid-range cards of the time. Worse still, in terms of power consumption, this model was on a par with the GTX 980 it replaced. Suffice to say, AMD was sweating it out at the time.
The Founders Edition concept:
With this, NVIDIA inaugurated the concept of Founders Edition cards, a way of enhancing the value of its own productions and breaking free from the reductive concept of “reference card”. At the time, the GTX 1080 was equipped with a premium heatsink featuring an attractive, angular metal shell, while a blower fan took care of cooling. Contact with the GPU and memory was entrusted to a steam chamber. However, this wasn’t the first generation to feature a neat heatsink: the metal shroud was initiated by the GTX 690 dating from 2012.
In any case, the card was so premium that it was sold at a higher price than the custom models, which offered greater user comfort via better-controlled temperatures and noise levels.
In short, back then, if you had a GTX 1080, you were the king of oil. In fact, this card, and its successor the Ti version, are still capable of running games today, despite the end of driver support.
