While everywhere you look you seem to be bombarded with ray tracing this or DLSS that, a lot of gamers aren’t particularly interested in the RTX 20 and 30-Series cards, and until more games support their special features, it’s a perfectly rational stance.
While these RTX GPUs of the future fail to capture the imagination and wallets of gaming communities at large, the ubiquity of the GTX 10-Series remains uncontested. The top-tier 10-Series cards in particular are simply refusing to go out of style even five years down the line.
So, if you know you want a high-end 10-Series card, but you’re finding it hard to settle on one, allow us to offer some clarity with this head-to-head comparison between the 1070 Ti and the 1080.
Architecture
The GTX 10-series are all based on Nvidia’s Pascal microarchitecture that marked many improvements upon the Maxwell architecture of the 900-Series such as improved deep learning via faster neural networking, NVLink high-speed interconnection bandwidth, and three times the memory bandwidth.
The 1070 Ti is structured using the GP104-300-A1 Pascal variant that contains 2432 CUDA cores thread across 19 SMs, 152 shader units, 64 render units, a 41KB L1 cache per SM, a 2MB L2 cache, and 7.2 billion transistors. So overall, a pretty impressive selection of hardware, but let’s take a look at how the 1080 compares.
The 1080 has 128 more cores with 2560 in total threaded through 20 SMs; 8 more texture units with 160 altogether; and the same 64 render units, 48KB L1 cache, 2MB L2 cache, and 7.2 billion transistors.
While the GTX 1080 does have a subtle hardware edge, there are some striking structural similarities here. With all those extra cores, the 1080 should shoulder shading workloads a little better, but otherwise, it’s a pretty close call. They even share similar clock speeds, the only difference being the 1080’s marginally faster-boosted rate.
Cooling
When it comes to thermals, these cards are shockingly similar which may foreshadow a hell of a contest come the gaming performance segment of our vs showdown. The Ti card and the 1080 share the same 180-watt pull, 94°C thermal capacity, and hit maximum temperatures in the low 80s – 81°C for the 1070 Ti and 83°C for the 1080. To keep all those extra cores cool, the 1080’s fans run ever so slightly louder, hitting maximum volumes in the way of 51-52dBA. The 1070 Ti whirrs just beneath at 49dBA.
The GTX series is most commonly found as blower-type cards, but if you’re keen on your overclocking, it might be worth considering axial designs and water cooling. If you do choose an open-air card, be sure to optimize your case-flow to protect your other peripherals.
Dimensions
If these cards didn’t have their names printed on any surface, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart; they’re identical twins! Their sizes will fluctuate from brand to brand depending on the enclosure and cooling setup, but as far as reference specs go, there’s not a fraction of a millimeter between them.
Measuring 4.376” (H) x 10.5” (L) x 2-slot (W), they’re not exactly small, and you will have to sacrifice an expansion slot on your motherboard to accommodate them, but then again, pretty much every quality GPU has that 2-slot width. They should fit in most mid towers, but if they’re on the smaller side of the mid spectrum, you may need to fit them on an angle or incorporate some kind of support to prevent sagging.
Resolution and Frames Per Second
If our other rounds are anything to go on, this should be something of a nail-biter. Does the 1070 Ti offer a close enough performance to the 1080 for the price, or does the 1080 eclipse all with its bulk?
1080p
As we predicted, 1080p is a close call, but in the end, those extra cores and a slightly advanced memory structure keep the 1080 just beyond the 1070 Ti’s reach. The Ti is capable of taking a few games from the 1080, Overwatch, or Minecraft for example, but these are only 1-8% victories. The 1080 manages to pull in a hairline 2% victory during PUBG and excels itself during Battlefield 1 with a 15% average win.
All things considered, both cards perform exceptionally well in 1080p on ultra settings, with averages rarely falling below 100fps, but the 1080 claims it. It’s a narrow 8% victory but a victory nonetheless.
1440p
We also get a strong performance from both cards in the 1440p arena with both cards averaging way beyond 60fps. The 1080 just about pips the 1070 Ti’s 74fps average with its own 81fps average, but during some challenging games, there’s very little in it. Take Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for example. Both cards take a thrashing, reducing average frames per second to the mid-30s, but there are only 2 frames a second between them.
4K
4K isn’t really either of these card’s native resolution, both finding it hard to really shine, but it’s another close round. Newer titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla prove a challenge, really damaging their averages, but due to their age, that’s to be expected.
Ray Tracing
While it’s true we’re still waiting on a more robust roster of games that will actually support real-time ray tracing, there’s no question that it has massive potential, and inevitably, with AMD also rising to the ray-tracing task, it’s the future of gaming graphics. How far into the future really depends on the interplay between Nvidia, AMD, and game developers.
Between these GPUs, it doesn’t really matter all that much as they were fated to be created before hardware ray tracing was a possibility in computer gaming, but that’s not the end of it. If you want a taste of RT sunshine, you can turn on software ray tracing in GTX cards. It hits GTX frame rates pretty hard, but seeing as these are top-tier cards, they may just be able to cope.
VRAM
There’s not much in it in terms of figures when analyzing the memory formats of the GTX 1080 and 1070 Ti. They both have 256-bit bus interfaces and an 8GB capacity, a solid amount for tackling some fast-paced 1440p gaming. What is different is the memory type.
The 1080 has a GDDR5X memory buffer with a third super-fast tier speed mode on top of the two (one slow, one fast) found in typical GDDR5 formats. So, in the end, the 1080 wins the memory tug of war by means of its 320GBps bandwidth and 10GBps effective rate, despite its decidedly lower memory frequency of 12521MHz. The 1070 Ti will muster 8GBps rates with a memory frequency of 2002MHz.
Verdict
The 1080 is the better card for gaming, and that’s fine. It would be strange if it wasn’t, but it’s not really all that much more impressive. In fact, if you hit the 1070 Ti with a bit of precision overclocking, you can easily get it to perform like a 1080 at stock settings. What’s complicated about this pair of cards is that they both cover the same territories: amazing in 1080p, fantastic in 1440p, neither really capable of 4K gaming.
So, is the 1080 really worth it? That depends on the price you can find it for. There may be as little as $20 between these cards in some instances, in which case, it seems like you might as well choose the 1080. The problem is, these are both expensive cards, so even a small amount extra can feel like a lot of money.