# NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

23 Hacker News commenters recommended NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 8 years (5 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Owners report it stays strong for years, running modern games at 1080p and local AI models. Caveat: Nvidia ended driver updates, leaving only security fixes.

## Why people recommend it

- Still performs well years later (6 comments): "no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates")... it still is an excellent card even 10 years later" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50121334)) "that 1080 ti isn't dead either, I passed the rig onto someone who wanted to get into PC gaming and it's still going strong." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641345)) "It was still viable and not in urgent need of a replacement" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644876))
- Runs local AI models well (3 comments): "It runs Gemma e4b multimodal, qwen 3.5 8b or the qwen 4b embeddings models well enough (40+ t/s for the LLMs)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519418)) "I can run a genuine dense model with usable context. GOAT card." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960002)) "You can get 60tps with three 1080tis and the sparse model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545255))
- Remarkably strong, long-lived hardware (4 comments): "remarkably great card that landed at just the right time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962335)) "It really is an impressive bit of hardware." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680047)) "the GTX 1080 Ti is/was a monster card" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261222))
- Great value over a long life (3 comments): "One of the best things I've purchased in retrospect since it was my main GPU up until the middle of 2025" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960318)) "making it effectively free (minus electricity use and opportunity cost)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633600)) "one of the best technology investments I've ever made" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676757))

## What people warn about

- Driver support ended; poor Wayland (3 comments): "no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates")... it still is an excellent card even 10 years later" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50121334)) "there isn't/wasn't proper support for 1000 series NVIDIA GPUs with Wayland" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45796635)) "The 1080ti support depreciation is a travesty." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50121981))
- Power draw made it costly (2 comments): "caused it to never enter low power mode, changing power consumption permanently from 10W -> 50W" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48354189)) "By the time I gave it away it wasn't worth the power cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672435))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090.md): 116 recommend
- [NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090.md): 102 recommend
- [NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-rtx-pro-6000.md): 77 recommend
- [Nvidia GPUs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-gpus.md): 67 recommend
- [AMD Radeon GPU](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amd-gpus.md): 48 recommend

## Where to get it

- [See price on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=NVIDIA+GeForce+GTX+1080+Ti+graphics+card&tag=hackerapprove-20) (affiliate link)
- [Official site](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti", https://hackerapproved.com/p/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-ti/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).