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Will the GTX 1080 & GTX 1080 Ti Run Starfield?
The GTX 1080, an aging king? Or a rugged pilot ready to take on Starfield? We find out
Updated: Sep 6, 2023 12:09 pm
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Look, we know what you’re thinking. The GTX 1080, In Starfield? The clearly upcoming game of the year? Complete with insane vistas, emphatic space combat, and enough particle physics to make even Einstein and Schwarzschild weep? Surely there’s no way that this humble GPU can hold its own against something like that? Well there’s more to this plucky under-dog than meets the eye, and that’s what we’re here to find out. Can the GTX 1080 run Starfield at launch? Answer, probably.
First off, let’s be clear, the GTX 1080 is an old card at this point. It launched way back in May 2016. Seven years of GPU and game development have gone by since then. And let’s be clear there are limits to technology, and optimization. Particularly when you get into the more advanced fields of Ray Tracing and its ilk. If you’re looking to get the best experience out of Starfield right now, we highly recommend that you consider either a new GPU, or potentially even an entire new gaming PC to get the most out of your space faring experience.
Now that’s not to say the GTX 1080 isn’t a great card. It is, it was, but there are some fights that even its mighty Pascal architecture just won’t be able to compete in, let alone beat. Starfield might be one of them.
Minimum Starfield System Requirements
So, what’s the good news then? Well, if we can take anything anyway from the system requirements that Bethesda announced, it’s this; The minimum system spec you can get away with, in Starfield, is an Intel Core i7-6800K (remember this is the old LGA 2011-3 HEDT processor, not the main-stream platform, you’ll need a 7000 series for that), 16GB of RAM, and most notably either an AMD Radeon RX 5700, or, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.
And oh boy, is that last part a saving grace for our little plucky underdog here. Yep, Starfield’s recommended spec features the GTX 1080s “younger brother”, the GTX 1070 Ti.
GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070 Ti
Now usually when we call a GPU a “younger brother”, we mean a lower spec card in the line-up. But here it’s very literal. You might not remember but the GTX 1070 Ti was actually a successor card, a stop-gap that launched on the back end of 2017, almost a year and a half after the first GTX 1080 made its way onto the shop floor. We suspect, It was produced to hold market-share, in combat against AMD’s offerings at the time, most notably the RX 580. However, it represented an intriguing product, as it was effectively a paired down GTX 1080.
As such it shares a lot of similarities, including a very similar CUDA core count (2560 for the GTX 1080 vs 2432 for the GTX 1070 Ti), the same L2 cache, the same base clock speed, the same amount of VRAM, the same TDP, even the same sized memory bus. That’s a lot of sames. What that led to was a card that performed incredibly similar across the board, with only minor differences coming down to slightly more cores and slightly faster memory. In our testing, at the time, you were looking at average frame-rates well within the ballpark of 4-10% of each other across most titles. Very close.
What Performance will the GTX 1080 get me in Starfield?
So here’s the kicker. We know that the minimum spec for Starfield has the GTX 1070 Ti as its poster child. And we know the GTX 1080 is, technically, superior to that card. What we don’t know is what “minimum spec” means. Is that 1080p 60fps on medium? Or 1440p on High? Or something else entirely? Until the game launches, and the team gets to grips benchmarking Starfield to within an inch of its digital pixelly life, we just can’t confirm that right now.
Let’s say Bethesda is being generous though, and “Minimum Requirements” in Starfield is 1080p at Ultra at 60fps. In that scenario, given the age of the GTX 1080, as long as you don’t enable Ray Tracing in game, you should hopefully be able to hit a comfortable 30–40 fps with ease. Putting you on par with Starfield’s console release, but with a bit more pzazz on the back-end (think viewing distance, volumetric fog, things like that).
It may require some slight tweaks to settings to achieve that, but we’re confident, given Starfield’s listed minimum specs, the GTX 1080 should at least be able to carry you a little while longer.
What about the GTX 1080 Ti?
What about the prestigious GTX 1080 Ti though? The successor to the GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 Ti was an absolute monster back in the day, based off of the same GP102 core found inside the Titan X and Titan XP, but with a slightly cut-down internal design (the GTX 1080 Ti featured the same 3,584 CUDA cores found in the original Titan X that launched a year prior, but with slightly less ROPs and a little less L2 cache as well). For all intents and purposes however, this gaming workhorse ran on par with that Titan in everything but the odd professional level benchmark, making it a fantastic GPU for those looking for cutting edge gaming performance back in 2017.
The step-up from the GTX 1080 by comparison however was staggering. Topping out at an impressive 40% additional CUDA cores, and nearly 50% additional Texture Units as well, couple that with 3GB of extra VRAM (bedded in at 11GB, again 1GB less than the Titan cards), and a 352 bit memory bus versus 256 bit, and you were looking at a card that produced on average about 16% more fps at 1080p, 25% more fps across games at 1440p, and an impressive 31% more fps at 4K.
That’s all well and good, but the big win here is in comparison to the RTX 2080. In fact, in 3D Mark: Firestrike generally speaking, the RTX 2080 and the GTX 1080 Ti performed pretty much identically on pure rasterization. Of course that difference is amplified in favor of the RTX 2080 when you look at pure Ray Tracing performance, but that’s besides the point. Starfield’s “recommended” spec has the RTX 2080 as its flagship Nvidia GPU, so, by proxy, if you’ve got a GTX 1080 Ti, as long as you don’t enable Ray Tracing, 1440p 60fps in Starfield should be certain.
AMD and Driver Updates
There is one other caveat to this, and that is that Starfield is an AMD sponsored title by design. In fact so much so is this the case, AMD is actually going to be launching two new GPUs, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, on the same day the game officially launches.
This means we should see heavier optimizations for team red products to perform in Starfield at launch. That also likely means Nvidia won’t have a massive amount of early access to develop its drivers for the title. Day 1 driver updates will be required to really get the best out of the GTX 1080. We suspect, given the popularity of Starfield, NVIDIA will be releasing a day-1 driver, followed up likely by a few other quick patches, dependent on any performance bugs or glitches that are discovered once the masses get a hold of it.
Another downside to AMD’s involvement in Starfield, is the lack of DLSS support at launch. Now this is a problem if you have anything after the RTX 2000 series, as DLSS gives you a significant antialiasing advantage, but as the 10 series doesn’t support this, you should be ok. It still sucks though, and not something we really wanted to see, in what is arguably going to be one of the games of the year.
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