294: The God-Tier GPU

Okay, I got a problem. Well, we are nothing if not problem solvers around here. So my desk was messy and I was like, I'm going to clean up my desk. And then I got partway through cleaning up my desk and I had to do some other stuff. So now the cleaning up my desk process is mid mid completion and has made my office a literal disaster zone. How long has it been in this particular state?

I don't want to talk about that. It's been longer than I'm comfortable with. That's the important question. How long has it persisted? I've been there before. Are we talking? Okay. It's been more than a week. Oh, wow. It might've been more than two weeks.

I was literally about to ask, are we talking hours or days? I wasn't expecting you to just hit me with weeks off the bat, but all right. Look, okay, so I started working on it, I think, before... the last not this week's peak stream but the peak stream before that okay it might have been the week before that though because i think we've done three of those true yes yeah so that was almost three weeks ago look it's hard to say

Well, but there's two days a week that I don't come into this room because like on PC world days, which are usually Tuesday and Wednesday, I pretty much like go get up in the morning, go into the office, work all day and then come home and fall asleep on the couch. Okay. All right. It sounds like it's solid days work. Are you just laptopping at those days? I'm just laptopping at those days. Yeah. So then, so then those days are kind of in my head dead days. And also.

like the weekends because it's summer break are pretty busy and are mostly family time and i often am not turning on my pc at all on on weekends right now The Switch 2 has contributed to this as well. I could see it. God, I've forgotten what it's like to go to an office and not have not have the desk at home be your work desk all the time. Like I used to be like you. There used to be like days would go by that I wouldn't even turn on the computer or I would.

I'd usually use it for like an hour in the morning when I was having coffee before I went to the office. But beyond that, it was like the computer was just like a thing I used occasionally here at home and not the thing that was on for 12 hours every day.

yeah i don't know i'm gonna have to work on it this weekend even though it's a holiday weekend i was thinking i was gonna try to not come in here too much this weekend but uh here we are like now it's bad it's been so long that i'm gonna have to start over Let me just ask this. Are there any dishes? Oh, God, no. I don't eat food in here. Wow, you don't eat at all at your desk?

Hardly ever. Okay, that man, I am jealous slash in admiration, I guess, of that kind of self-control. I eat in here way more than I should, and I'm pretty tidy about it, but still, it's bad. I think the big difference is that my wife and daughter are here often during the daytime. So going out to have lunch is an important time for me. So sometimes I'll have a soup. I don't eat stuff with crumbs in here, I guess, is the rule.

Sensible. Sure. That soup can be sloppy though. Like sometimes you get the wrong kind of soup. You're like, you know, a morsel of some kind falls from the spoon and lands in the soup and the soup splats. And then also the place that I put my bowl typically is to the left of me.

Yeah, that's that's you don't put it in the mouse. Well, no, right. But also that bowl is right on the edge of the desk hovering right over the tower. So like soup splatters have narrowly missed like the USB ports on top of the computer a few times, which is not good. Oh, yeah, that's that's so.

OK, so I would never eat ramen in here because I don't get slurps on the on the monitor. Sure. I don't. I stopped eating food in here because I used to solder in here a lot more. And that meant there were little bits of like I've used lead free solder for a long time, but I'm still like. squeamish about eating around places where I saw her for obvious reasons. So, yeah, I don't know, man. I just don't eat too much in here. But but yeah, like I'm going to have to.

What I did was I did the thing where I took everything off the desk and I put it in a box and now the box has become a problem. Dude, I am looking around. There are like eight hotspots in this room of that exact same phenomenon. It's like, oh, OK, that is.

Let's say that's like March to June, 2024 is desk contents that are now perched on top of this piano over here. And then the four months before that are over in the corner behind that. Well, so, so I fixed my, I needed this comes up because the other day.

I fixed the dead display on the front of my receiver. Great. Excellent. I think somebody in chat in the Discord had recommended just opening it up and hitting all the contact points with the soldering iron. And that would fix it. And I will tell you, absolutely did. By hitting, you mean you use no additional solder? You literally just touch the tip of the pen to the existing solder and it just kind of refloated or whatever?

look so i put a little bit extra solder on one of them because it was like so okay so it was pigs in the discord had said hey uh there were a lot of cold solders or cracked solders on mine and when i touched them then it then it fixed it And there was one that it didn't get quite enough on there that I was comfortable with the amount of solder that was remaining because there were holes and stuff. You could just tell by sight.

Yeah, I did look at it and see it wasn't a great job. So I did just a smidge more solder on that one, man. And I plugged it back in, powered it up. Actually, I'm going to be honest. I didn't even unplug it when I opened it up. I opened it up. And I unplug because it doesn't have a loose cable on the back. This is a wide ranging cold open, but but there's a connector from the power externally to the board inside that I could just pop off. OK.

It was a little scary. Yeah. I mean, there's some pretty big electrical equipment in those receivers, right? Yeah. I was very careful. Yes. Okay. So yeah, I did that. It took longer to disassemble it than it did to do the solder, solder pat work to like fix it.

A, that must have been a great feeling, firing that thing up and seeing it work. B, I wish I had known all this before I paid somebody like $100 to do this. Granted, it was like seven, six, seven years ago. Way before I had a pine sole and would have been capable of doing it.

Mine's been not working for so long that my daughter didn't know it had a screen. It's amazing. It doesn't matter, though, because it's like HDMI CEC. So as long as everything works, it just switches to it and everything's cool. It's only when you plug in something that doesn't support CEC or that it doesn't work, that it's a problem. Also, is that receiver older than your daughter? It's got to be close. Absolutely. Yeah, no, there's no doubt because I bought that.

That that was part of TV quest, which we did when we were still in the old whiskey basement, I think. Wow. And she she was post whiskey basement. Wow, man, that is a long serving receiver. I think she was conceived probably after a Friday night whiskey. Anyway, OK, well, I'm not going to get into how the receiver might have been involved in that. But congratulations to your daughter and your receiver. Bye.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hi. Hello. Greetings. Normally, we might have done the dirty desk as the cold open and the resurrecting your receiver as the... Post music banter, but now we're just going to get right into the topic this week. Burned all of our stuff already. Products that changed everything. This is the.

Is this the third one or the second one in a now long running series? Name them all. Xbox 360. And then telemouse explorer, right? Optical mouse. I think that's it. OK, so this is number three was parceling these out with with caution and consideration. I think we might be on a roughly one a year cadence on these. That seems like that seems right. Like you don't add.

Look, you don't vote for the Hall of Fame every month. That's true. You know, that's true. And, you know, by definition, there can only be so many products out there that changed everything. Yeah. And this is what this one is. It's a mixed bag. this week it's an uh it's ups and downs because we have you know we're inducting this new product into the cat into the into the into the into the hall of fame basically because they're ending support for it

That's timely for once. End of life. Yeah, for once this was a timely one. It is the GeForce GTX 1080 slash 1080 Ti is what we're talking about. I mean, look, I think it's probably the 1080 Ti.

Oh, shit. Mr. Softy's here. Hold on. Wait, what? Hold on. Hold on. I'm placing an order with the child. She just ran out. Wait, is this going in the podcast? We have to keep talking. If so. Yeah, we should keep talking. All right. Are you going to walk us through your mistress? Hey, look.

Bonus surprise post show or post episode music banter. Yeah, this is Mr. Softee is out on the street in front of my house right now. Wait, does Mr. Softee have an app? Oh, hell yeah. But I hear the music through the window. Okay. Mr. Softee, like franchised? Yeah, it's mostly in California and New York, it turns out. Wow, he's literally on our street.

You know, they redid the, you know, the classic song for the ice cream truck is a little racist. So they did the straw. Oh, oh, oh, sure. Yes. Okay. Pretty racist. Yeah. So they made a non-racist version of the music. Can you sing it a little bit? Here, I can just open the app and it'll play. Oh, great. Because there is an ice cream truck that I hear around here, too, and I would love to know if that's also Mr. Softy.

I have not seen any other non-Mr. Softy ice cream trucks. Yep, that's the one. Yeah. 100%. Famously, Robert Downey Jr. wore a Mr. Softy t-shirt in the start of one of the Iron Man movies. I can't remember which one.

Anyway, so products has changed everything. The 1080i specifically, but Pascal really was a turning point, both good and bad for modern graphics, right? It was the first real good DirectX 12 GPU. It was the first thing that you could do 4K on in most shipping current games. It was the beginning.

of mining which was a incredibly detrimental for enthusiast gamers for the next like well eight years or something seven years yes sure um and uh they're ending support for yeah for those cards in in drivers starting with the next kind of major release for the nvidia drivers and nvidia unified drivers so yes so they um they ended cuda support for this thing back in may

Which may not be related, but it does seem the timing does seem less than coincidental. I think I think I mean, I think anybody's serious using graphics cards for computing probably wasn't using CUDA on a 1080. With the exception maybe of the deep seek folks. Sure. Cause they famous, they trained that on a giant 10 80 cluster. Is that, and I wonder, is that verified? That's what, that's what all the reporting was at the time that that thing came out. That's crazy.

Yeah, because they bought, because, you know, mainland China, they bought those GPUs before there was an embargo. Sure. And a lot of them were 1080s and 1080s and Pascal. Interesting. Well, you know, it's still easy to believe that this is all part of a planned. Yeah. Planned obsolescence, you know, phased rollout or phased phase out. What am I trying to say here? Like they probably, I assume, have planned, you know, to end support for.

Both CUDA and now drivers like that's that's the thing I was trying to get to is that now we have word from NVIDIA that what we think is the next release of the common NVIDIA drivers will be the last version to support the Pascal cards, the 10 cards.

Yeah, I mean, there may be point releases between now and when it happens, but it's going to be soon is the kind of TLDR. We don't know exactly what NVIDIA's driver roadmap is, but just for anybody listening who's still using a 1080 and wants to know this information, we're on 576 drivers right now. Yeah. And they're saying five 80 will be the last 10 series release. Yeah. This is reported. This was reported by tech power up at a bunch of other places. Yeah. It was.

Part of their messaging to developers, basically. And it came off of the NVIDIA developer forum for Unix graphics is how they describe it. Yeah. But the Linux drivers track, I believe, the same versions as the Windows drivers. So this should be common to all versions. Yeah, they're saying they're killing support because it's, well, A, it's time, but B, it lets them focus on the newer cards and stuff like that. Along with Pascal, which is the 10 series, they're killing...

Uh, Maxwell as well, which is I think seven, eight, nine, some, some seven, some eight and some nine series cards. Crazy to me to think that there were 700 cards still out there supported. My bet is that they're probably mobile because there's a lot of laptops that shipped later with Maxwell GPUs, but we're not here to talk about that. Well, no, but since you mentioned it.

I don't remember an 800 series. That was mobile only. Oh, was it? Okay. Well, there you go. Yeah. So, or they may have done, they may have done. They may have done discrete parts for like weird HP machines and stuff like that that were based on mobile. But there was no like 880 or anything. There was an 880, but I think it was in the prior naming scheme. I'd have to look.

Okay. It doesn't matter. We're not talking about that. Oh, look, I like reminiscing about old graphics card model numbers, but anyway. Well, okay. So the point, though, is like looking at this. My initial reaction, because we talked about this on The Full Nerd a little bit over the last six or eight months, because they said when the five series came out that the ten series cards were going to get deprecated at some point in the future, not too distant future.

My initial thought was, oh, my God, it's way too early for them to do that. That's crazy. And then I looked at the dates that the 10 series launched, which the original 10 series cards came out in 2016. The 1080 TI came out and it was announced at GDC in 2017. So March or April of 2017. I think it was actually announced at the GeForce Tech, the Graphics Tech Conference, whatever NVIDIA's thing is called, but it was GDC timeframe.

And if my math is right, that means that the 1080, the original 1080 came out nine years ago, almost. It's probably OK that they're killing support for it. It's probably it's probably time. Yeah, probably past time. Yeah. And just to be clear, you'll still be able to download the legacy driver like you're they're not going to kill support. And it's just that you have to download a legacy driver for current unsupported hardware.

And that will that will mean that you don't get like like updates for new titles and stuff like that, like you would with a with a newer card. But like like support functionality in newer games is going to probably get more and more spotty over time. Yeah. So, I mean, we can talk about that.

now skip ahead a little bit if you want because because adam uh patrick murray friend of the show over at pc world did some testing of the 1080 i think the ti versus the b580 when intel launched the battle mage cards earlier this year and The interesting thing about it was that the average frame rates were kind of okay, but the 1% lows were really, really bad on the 1080 TI, presumably because of either optimization problems or some inherent limitation of the pipeline.

regard to how modern more modern cards are designed um the reason we're talking about this is because when these cards came out the 1080 was good but the 1080i was really a god tier card like it was a cut down Pascal Titan card, which that like they basically turned off one one SM core and then they sold it for half price. Right. So it was like the 1080 launched at $599.

The 1080Ti launched at $699 a year later. It was way, way, like 30% faster, 40% faster in some stuff. It was faster than the Pascal Titan because they clocked the memory higher. And it had a buttload of RAM for a consumer card. It had 11 gigs of RAM at the time, which now we're like, everybody's like, oh, I don't know, 8 gigs, 12 gigs. That's definitely not enough. 12 is on the bubble these days.

but back then 11 gig cards were nuts right that was crazy because most people were playing at 1080p or lower resolutions 4k monitors were brand new and crazy expensive i i went i bought one for fujo stuff because we were doing we needed 4k for for an adult swim project that we're working on and in order to get a monitor that could do 4k

I had to pay a ridiculous amount of money. Like it was really expensive. What connection standard were they using at that time? It was a display, it was a display port, like 1.1 or 1.2 or something. I don't remember. Okay.

But the point is, it was locked at 60. 60 was the highest you could go because we didn't have connection standards that would move enough data to go higher than that. And you really didn't play games at 4K. You played games at... 1080p if you had a nice machine 1440 was kind of starting to to move on but it was still sure those were still still kind of a novelty right yeah um so when the ti came out at 699 bucks

You were looking at a card, like I said, it had 10, 11 gigs of RAM versus eight gigs and had 11 gigs instead of an even number because of the weird the way they cut down those cores from the Pascal. So you had one less RAM chip on the card, basically. It was a 352-bit memory bus versus a 256-bit memory bus, so you had more memory bandwidth even at the same clock speeds, and then they clocked it up a little bit over the Pascal Titan card.

it had 3584 shading units versus 2560 on the on the 1080 vanilla uh tmu's texture texture units were 224 versus 160. ROPs were 88 versus 64 and the SM units were 28 versus 20. So like it was more of everything, which was unusual for a TI at this point. Previously, the TIs were kind of clocked up or process shrinks or something like that. Sure.

And this was, it was exciting. ROPs, raster units of some kind. Raster operation pipelines, I believe. And then SM. I don't remember what SMs meant at this time. uh shader model units maybe but i don't think that's right it might be it might be um let me look streaming multi-processor that was what i was gonna guess actually yeah streaming multi-processor so um it was it was

Stupid fast. You could run stuff at 4K. That was novel when the 1080 Ti came out. Yes. So I've got a little anecdote here. I took an NVIDIA meeting in 2017 at E3 to go see Destiny 2 on PC, which was not out yet. running on a 1080 Ti at native 4K. Yeah. It was the first time I had ever seen a native 4K game. And also this was pre-DLSS, right? Oh, yeah. I don't remember when DLSS rolled out. Two series.

OK, right. So it was midway through the two. It was like a mid cycle update to the two. So this was way before frame upscaling was. A twinkle in the consumer's eye. Farm to table, 100% real pixels. Like if you were seeing a 4K game, it was natively rendering at 4K and it screamed. It was an ADTI. I love fast.

In fact, I will link I put up I put up all the capture of that appointment on the giant bomb YouTube channel at the time, and I will link that in the show notes. I love just as an aside. I love that you did this this way because. it's not like there's no intro there's no it's just like footage of the the thing that they showed you while you're in that appointment that was that was the giant bomb spirit and approach to covering games was i came back they gave me

I think I've talked about this before. They gave me what was at the time a very nice 64 gigabyte USB thumb drive. Oh, yeah. It was shaped like a 1080 Ti. Oh, you got one of those? Yeah, it's in my backpack out in the hall right now. still a good USB stick. Oh, those are so cool. Yes. So they gave you the, I mean, I think you could buy them off their merch store at the time. Eventually I think. Yeah. That's a,

They gave me the file and I had the footage and I came back to the office and I was just like, why don't I just throw this into YouTube because YouTube can handle 4K videos now. Did not even cut it down so it has four minutes of just a static menu at the end of the footage.

Like I pulled that up earlier and I was like, oh, how far I've come. Like now I would know how to losslessly chop that video up so that it was a little bit nicer than that. But anyway, so I don't see those thumb drives on eBay for what it's worth. Really? No. Well, that's still a valuable USB stick. It's still the second biggest one I have. You put Ventoy on that thing. That's right. Oh, wait. $325 with the box. What? Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah, they're...

People are really hot for those. Just FYI. Look, man, you can see why there might be a fandom that has grown up around the 1080 TI. Well, so that's what I was going to say is the thing about it was it lasted forever. So because.

because of the mining craze, because it was the min spec, like the 970 was the min spec for VR stuff. like it became it became a card that was the target card for like five years for a lot of developers and um you know the stuff that came with the 2080 and the 3080 was

was ray tracing and DLSS support. But fundamentally, the 1080, especially the 1080 TI, if you had bought one of those for $700 in 2017, it was a card that lasted you through not being able to get a gpu because of mining not being able to get a gpu because of the pandemic not being able to get a gpu because they suddenly got really really expensive and like

To the point that when Intel came around with Battlemage, the thing that they said was, hey, we're targeting all the people that are sitting on 1080TIs right now and don't want to spend $1,000 on a new video card, right? Like it was, it was. Like it is the goat video card for the modern direct X 12 era, right? Up until the 4090 probably. And it was perfectly positioned to draft off of the current consoles at the time. Like that's, that's, that was actually a big part of the, um,

You mean Xbox One and PS4? Yeah. As we know, as we've seen for the last three console generations, game development always trickles down from whatever the consoles are at the time, right? Games are developed against the current consoles and then PC benefits from being way faster than those machines. Right. But running the same games, obviously they add extra effects and stuff and you can run them at higher resolution. But like the base development is targeted at much weaker.

hardware than you are likely to have if you build a PC even like a year after new consoles come out. So those consoles came out in 2013, the PS4 and Xbox One. 2016, so three years later for the regular 1080, four years later for the 1080 Ti. That was like perfect mid-gen placement for, here are cards with roughly the same capabilities except a little more than...

The current consoles. When I say capabilities, I'm talking like specific features, not just speed, not raw speed, but way, way more raw speed. Right. Yeah. So you could run everything at 10 AP or 1440 P instead of the 720 P upscale that most of the consoles were rendering at that time. Yeah. Like, in fact, yes, famously, the Xbox one was turning out quite a few 720 P games at that time.

A lot of 900p on the PS4, but, and you know, that turned out to be quite a long generation. That was a seven year generation. So if you bought even a regular 1080 or even the TI, you were. We were set for a good number of years before the PS5 and Series X came out. And then, of course, we know what happened during the pandemic that stretched out the longevity and the usefulness of the 10 cards even further.

Well, and the kind of upshot of all the demand increase because of mining and pandemic and all that stuff was that the price of cards went the price of a top, top tier premium card really, really went up. even before we got to the point that they were rebranding that what would previously had been like the Titan professional type cards as something, something, you know, as, as 90 series cards. Right.

So, um, it was, it was a weird time and it was, it was like, if you had a 1080 TI, it was, it was nice. Cause it felt like you had bought. It felt like you'd bought a Lamborghini, right? It felt like you'd gone out and gotten a Bugatti Veyron and you just slotted that thing in all two or three slots.

And you had the fastest thing that you could buy for a long time, even when the 2080s with the 2000 series cards came out a year and a half later. They were kind of underwhelming because they didn't. The 1080 was so good that the performance gap between a 2080. vanilla and the 1080ti was like 10 or 12 percent in anything that didn't use ray tracing right and it didn't feel like much of an upgrade it felt pretty lateral it was a little quieter which to be clear

At the time, the reviews mentioned, oh, man, the 1080 Ti, pretty quiet at idle, which was a new thing. Still 40 decibels at full burn. Also, remember when the top of the line NVIDIA card was $699? Yeah. Yeah, well, OK, so it wasn't really the top line. So the Titan cards existed then. Nobody bought the Titan cards because they were like.

People viewed them as like workstation or, you know, enthusiast cards. You didn't even need one, though. That's the thing. It's like the regular TI was so adequate, like you said, for everything on the market already that like. For all intents and purposes, the $699 card was the top of the line. Well, so that I was going to say that's the other thing that happened with this is that the 1080 Ti pushed all of the bottlenecks away from the GPU for the first time ever, as far as I can tell.

You know, the things that previously would bottleneck on fill rate or shader calculations or whatever, when you're playing games, suddenly we're bottlenecking on memory, system memory bandwidth or. uh cpu speed or whatever and and it completely changed the way we had to do video card benchmarks for a bit um it meant that everybody had to go out and buy 4k gaming from 4k monitors to benchmark video cards when we were using 1440p or 1080p cards before

And it was a wild time. How long did that trend of games running at native 4K last, though? Because I have to assume that developers started pushing the hardware pretty fast after that. I don't remember that being a long period of time that people were playing a lot of native 4K games, I feel like. Well, it depends on what you played, depending on the kind of games you played.

Um, if you were playing, like if you were okay playing games that were 30 Hertz games on those consoles, you, you could play them at 4k on the 10 80 for a long time. If you wanted more than 30, if you wanted 60 frames a second instead of 30, then you had to scoot your res down a little bit. And really, really, we kind of never got there because by the time.

4K monitors were more prevalent. We were into the second generation, you know, the first generation of DLSS kind of a whiff because it required training specific. for each game and like didn't really see wide support. And it was it was it was a mess. The second gen, the more generalized version of DLSS that came out with the midway. I can't remember the end of the 20 series or early 30 series. That sounds about right.

was a was a real moment like that was a that was when 4k started becoming possible because you just set it to 4k perform performance dlss and all of a sudden your game ran at like a crazy high frame rate and also 4k ish So there aren't a lot of games today that you run 4K native without DLSS unless you're playing something old. Yeah, most people don't. I mean, unless, you know, unless you're the type of person who is becoming increasingly angry about fake frames. I don't know.

We don't need to talk about people being angry on the internet. That's a tale as old as time. But, but yeah, the, the fake frames, the fake frame, fake frames is a different conversation for another day. Yes. So yeah. Where are we now? Like we're eight years since the launch of Pascal, right? It's been 2016, nine years since the launch of Pascal. It's 2025. I keep forgetting. The 1080 Ti doesn't hang with modern $250 or $300 video cards.

To be expected. It's to be expected. Although, you know, like you get into conversations about how long hardware should last. And like, I feel like, I mean, this is a bit anecdotal, but you see people talking about it out there and you see quite a few people who say like, yeah, I'd like a. a 10 card was my first PC card. Like it was, that's why that's when I moved to PC gaming from consoles. I think that like the, the mid teens were like,

For whatever reason, I knew a lot of people like this, like Patrick Klebek, Dan Riker, people I worked with who had been lifelong console gamers. For whatever reason, there was a huge groundswell of people moving from console to PC in the kind of late teens. And so I think a lot of people, their first card was a 10 card. And that may have, I guess, I guess the best way to put it is like, maybe they didn't know how good they had it in terms of how long that hardware was going to last.

And there's like, they've kind of been crashing into like a hard reality. Now that the pace, the acceleration of hardware adoption has sped back up again. I think that's probably true. I think the, I think, you know, the last. the lifespan of this card has been weird because prior to this point, it was sometimes difficult to get new hardware, but it, but only for like a couple of months. And then, you know, the supply chain would work itself out.

And demand would go down and supplies would go up. You start seeing sales and stuff like that. The cards that came after this, the 20 series and 30 series and 40 series didn't ever get discounted for all intents and purposes. I mean, you'd see an occasional sale or occasional. bundle or something that was like a pretty good deal. But but like a 4090 was selling for more than MSRP used when the 50 when the five series shipped.

Right. Which is crazy. That's nuts. I don't know if it's still six months. Yeah, I would believe close to it at least because absolutely, at least through the pandemic and after that was the case, if not more recently. Yeah. So. So it's weird that it lasted this long. It also is. I think I think you nailed it when you were talking about the generation. I think part of it is that the PS4 and Xbox One were kind of under spec for 1080p.

Yeah, just because of the timing of when they came out was such that the hardware wasn't all the way there for running those games at native resolutions, which is why we saw so many 720p and 960p games.

for upscaled for those generations now the other thing that happened at the same time is when you're dealing with more pixels upscalers get better right even without doing the ai stuff that happens with fsr and dlss just Multiplying the number of pixels, increasing the number of pixels with Langsos or whatever, one of your ancient Photoshop filters is going to look better than going from 480 to 720p because you're starting with more data.

And so it wasn't as big of an impact until suddenly it was, and those consoles felt chuggy, and we saw some iffy ports and bad Unreal implementations on the PS4 or whatever it was. And all of a sudden, your friend that was playing Destiny on the 1080 Ti was running it, you know, 60 plus frames per second at a higher resolution. And you were running. It was like playing on a GameCube.

And it made an easy sell, right? Yep. At the same time, there was also a real renaissance of PC games at that time. Like all the Battle Royale stuff happened and it was wildly popular. Yes. And pulled a bazillion people into the PC. That's what PUBG was 2017. So it was the same year as the TI came out then. Yeah. Yeah. I had a 1080 that I bought for VR stuff. And then.

We had to get it like we were doing an adult swim project that that Carl, that live call in show with Carl from Aqua Teen, and they wanted four. They wanted four 1080p feeds for different cameras so they could live mix it. So I had to get. I bought a 1080 TI so I could run that at that resolution. And we built the identical machines here and there so that I could so I could test stuff locally before before we got to the live production. You still have it.

Yeah, I do. We did the 1080 TI that I bought then in. Hold on. I opened up the Amazon page. I bought the 1080 TI in July of 2017. It's a Frozer. It's an MSI. great 1080 ti gaming x 11g i bought it for 799 i think okay $769 plus tax and shipping. I mean, that's like what a 10% markup roughly. That's not so bad. Look.

It's the dual Frozer. Oh, right. Of course. Of course, those are of course the Frozer commands a preview. Sorry. Twin Frozer six VI. Great. And it was it was a it was a two and a half slot card. It didn't fit in my external. I was super pissed because I had a Razer external dock for the EGPU when I went on the road and it didn't fit in that thing.

So I almost had to send it back, but I couldn't find another one. And I needed I just ended up having to work around it. It was fine. Wait, did you just have to, like, leave the enclosure? I just left the enclosure off the card dangling out of the side. It was really stupid. Great. But but yeah, so.

And that one, the other reason I like that one is it had a DBI port. Most of them, they'd killed the DBI port on. Sure. But it was the twin Frozer, two Frozers. It was such a, that was such a rat card. It was also very good at PUBG. That might be too cold. One fan was red, one fan was black. Brad. I don't even know what to say to that. Yeah, no, it's that cool. They don't make cards like that anymore. Old design choice. Yeah.

I had a regular 1080 around this time, and I don't think I ever appreciated how much faster the TI was like I kind of always assumed. And I guess there had been a 980 TI, right? Yeah, they'd been doing TI's for a long time. There were TI's started with like GeForce 4.

Oh God, that's right. Okay. Yes. No, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Wow. How did I totally, well, but I guess like the meaning had changed a bit over time, right? Yeah. Typically, typically in the olden days, the TI was a process update. So they'd move, they'd move that. architecture to a new process node and you'd get lower power consumption, higher or higher performance or quieter or something out of that. And often they would do, I want to say often they would do the next.

architectures, mid range cards on the new node first. Okay. To kind of test the waters and then they do the bigger, more complicated die later on. Sure. But, but at this point.

the ti was hey we have a bunch of these pascal titan dies and they're not all passing qual so we got to unload them somehow and they accidentally made a card that was so good it made every other card after it piss off more and more of their their enthusiast audience right like it was an anomaly is what i'm getting at yeah it's a complete freak

Like I had always considered the TI to be like, ah, you know, it's probably maybe 10% faster. It's not really worth worrying about. But like, I don't think I appreciated at the time exactly how much better this was. The common wisdom was you either were on the TI upgrade path or you were on the mainline upgrade path. And you didn't go from one to the next. That's exactly where I ended up. I was on the non-TI, the regular vanilla path for about four cards in a row.

I actually, my 1080 was liberated from an office PC, let's say. What? That was not being, it was not being used. Okay. That's fine. It had sat inert for several months, let's say. Mine was an EVGA. it's a fine card no frozer though it wasn't a frozer nope um so yeah so that's the that's the 1080 ti i think i think now the question is

Is the product that changed everything here, the 1080 TI? Is it the 1080? Is it Pascal? I don't know. What do you think? I don't know if like Pascal broadly is that remarkable. Like, for example, I was looking at the feature set and I was like. Is the Pascal series the first one that had Envy Inc and Envy Deck, the hardware video acceleration? I don't think it...

Oh, no, that was nine series. No, it was before that. Even it was like 600 cards had like a nascent version of it. And the V2 one didn't come until the 20 series. Right. So that's because it was unusable at first because the quality was too bad. Yes, it was the it was the Turing cards, the 20 cards where it was.

Like, finally, that's when you finally saw the quality tests that people were doing and going like, oh, this is like as good as software now. We're close enough. Yeah, Kepler-based GeForce 600 series was the first. NVInc, NVDeck generation. But anyway, the point is like, I can't think of a ton of like major features that the 10 series introduced. Like, you know, like you said, it was pre-TensorCore, pre-DLSS. It was post-video encoding.

It was just a better and more DirectX 12 compliant card, right? It was just kind of faster and better dot dot dot generically. I think it was maybe maybe it really is the TI for the insane amount of speed and longevity for the price that is.

is like the king here i i think i think it's like i for me i think it's the ti because the ti was just it was so good for such a at the time It felt like an expensive card, but from modern standards, it's such a low price that it feels it feels feels like that's the right choice. The wild card here is the 1060 is still the number 12th most popular card on Steam's hardware survey. Really? Yeah, it's still wild. It's the only 10 card that's still in the top 20, I think. Okay.

Anybody from valve is listening who works on that site. It would be great if you numbered, if you numbered the, but you don't like counting hardware, hardware survey results if possible. But anyway, there's a lot of cards on this list. I mean, there's probably close to a hundred.

GPUs. I think the 1050 TI might be number 20. I can't like I said, like you said, there's no numbers. You have to kind of eyeball it. Yeah. The 1600 cards are on there, but they're actually not. They're not Pascal. They're they're like a cut down Turing. They're a cut down Turing, I believe. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. Because they have the NVE Inc. 2 support. Okay. So they were very popular with streamers, two PC streaming setups because of that. Sure.

Now, I mean, I guess we should mention the venerable, I was actually kind of shocked by this, the venerable 1080 and 1080 TI on the Steam survey results are 0.54% and 0.4% respectively now. I kind of actually expected there would have been more of those still out there. That is correct. But I think the kind of people who buy a 1080 Ti are likely to, they're likely to upgrade more often, right? Yeah, sure.

There was a lot of conversation on message boards. In fact, actually, when I searched up, I was searching, why is 1080TI the goat? Just to see what people were saying on message boards. And I put forum on the end. And there were a lot of conversations about this. And it was fun because when you go back in time on those searches, you would see people talking about making the upgrade to the 2080 TI or the 3080 TI and then.

There's a huge spike of them on the four series cards because like that, a lot of people waited until four series from the 1080 TI, which makes sense. That's a five year, five year loop. Man, a 10 card to a 40 card is one hell of an upgrade. It is a.

pretty substantial upgrade. I hope you got a new monitor to go to. Yes. Here's a question I have for you. Yeah. What do you got? You think, I mean, especially in light of, you know, you talking about those, um, 1080 TI USB sticks being very expensive on eBay.

Like there's clearly some fandom around this card. Oh yeah. You think we see any kind of like aftermarket open source efforts to keep these cards going in the way that you still see people trying to play games on voodoo fives and stuff like that? Like, is this, is this going to be one of those?

revered enough pieces of hardware that down the line, there's still going to be some Herculean efforts to keep it alive. I think that this is a card that will be in people's retros PCs for a long time. Right. I think, I think. When we talk about this, we always get on Full Nerd, we always get a lot of comments and feedback on it. I think if you want to build a DX11 retro machine, this is the card to have probably, right?

And there are so many of them out there that they probably will not be hard to source for quite a while. It's funny. When we were at the flea market, I don't know if you were there that time, but earlier this year at the electronics flea market, there was somebody selling unopened new in box 1080s. Yeah.

I think I think at least one member of our party considered strongly grabbing one. I was admonished when I got to PC World that next week for not buying one. Yeah, because they were like, we would we would love to have a new inbox unopened and ATI. Would it have remained unopened at that office? Probably would have opened it, used it for a video. But yeah. OK. But yeah, no, I don't like I don't know if we're going to see that again because the ray tracing stuff is advancing. It's such a.

fast pace and the machine learning stuff is advancing at such a fast pace. I don't know that we're going to see a card that lasts eight or 10 years like this again, eight or nine years. And it's kind of a bummer because the cards are not cheap now. Oh, no, they're not. I was going to say one one last note here is we have if you're still running a 1080, a 10 series card, whether it's a 1060 or 1080, whatever. Like.

I don't think you have to worry. Like, I don't think I don't think you have to like your the world is not lit on fire to upgrade that. It's not like Windows end of life in your old Windows 10 machine in October ish. where you won't get security updates anymore. Right. And it's not like your card is going to stop working for new games next week, like we said earlier. I would guess, I mean, you tell me, I would assume that cards will mostly work with...

new games going forward for some time. Like what I, what I mean is like It's probably going to be a while before you see a game that just refuses to run on an old driver version on one of these cards. Well... In the short term, it'll be more like, oh, maybe the games are not functioning quite exactly properly. I mean... Anything that uses ray tracing isn't going to work, right? Of course. So like doing the dark ages is unplayable on the goat. Yeah. That's already. That's already.

coming to pass. I think we're going to see more ray tracing games, more games that require ray tracing. That is absolutely true. I'm talking I'm talking like two weeks after they drop support for this, not a year or two later, because because you're right. Absolutely. Games are going to start requiring ray tracing hardware very quickly.

Yeah, I think whether this is going to continue to work for you depends on what kind of gamer you are, right? Like if you're still playing WoW, it's going to be a long time before WoW deprecates support for a 1080. Yeah, I meant newer games, like new games that are just coming on the market if they are raster only, like setting aside specific requirements like ray tracing. I guess you've probably got another year or two at least before you start running into trouble.

Maybe that's optimistic. Yeah. Looking at the performance numbers for the testing that PC World did on on the 1080 last January or December when the 580 came out, I would not. play current releases on the 1080 at 1080p i don't think all right um i think i think if you're playing counter-strike if you're playing

If you're playing WoW, if you're playing Diablo 3, like if you're playing older games, go nuts. You're fine. Don't worry about it. If you are the kind of person who plays new releases when they come out, it's going to be a limitation. The good news is for the first time in like.

six years, there's relatively inexpensive alternatives that are going to give you a good experience. Particularly at the type of resolution that you're probably already playing games on a 1080 at. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, honestly. Both of the Radeons that are out right now, the 9060 and 9070 are great at 1080p and pretty good at 1440p for most stuff, especially the kind of games that you're probably playing on your 1080.

And if you can get them at MSRP, which we're starting to see now, finally, then you should absolutely, if you're looking for an upgrade there, good choice. And that is, sorry, I'm just checking really quick, or like a 9060 is? So there's a 9060 8GB, avoid the 8GB cards. Sure. And the XTs are slightly clocked up, basically. So it's basically like a $50 bump from the 9060 8 gig to the 9060 16 gig. And then another 50 bucks, I think, to the XT.

And I don't remember where it starts, unfortunately. Maybe 350. I'm slogging through. There are so many results on like Amazon and places like that. I don't know who to trust as an actual MSRP. This is where I go to tech power up. Yes, tech power up is an excellent site. Shout out to them. I consistently find information on tech power up that I can't find on other hardware sites. So the 9060 XT launched at 349 bucks, which is the souped up version. All right. I mean, that's that's.

That's half. That's literally half of what the TI costs. If you count inflation for what it's worth. Yeah. So like that's, that's, you know, that's, that's pretty encouraging. The things have ended up in a place like that.

Yeah. So, I mean, it has been almost 10 years, but, but, um, well, but like you said, these options didn't even exist three, four or five years ago. Yeah. And, and the nice thing is it's a small card. You want to kind of upgrade your power supply for it. It's I think a single eight pin power connector even so. you're probably pretty good. If you want to spend less than that, the Battle Mage cards, the B580s, are generally available for $300 now, and they're quite good. You can...

I think the Intel version launched at 250, but I don't know that you can find those at this point because they went pretty fast. Yeah. And now those do need a pretty beefy CPU by comparison, right? To really shine. You need something that supports rebar. So if you don't have a rebar, if you don't and probably you need that for the 9060 as well. We haven't actually tested that. I mean, I guess that's that's just inherent to the way PCs are right. Like like if you're if you're.

If you're looking to put one of these new cards in a, let's say, eight year old CPU and motherboard, like there are just going to be bottlenecks you're going to run into. That's exactly it. The thing I'll say about the Intel thing, there was a couple of big news stories about that earlier this year about Intel underperforming on like.

9 series Intel CPUs and older. My understanding is that they've worked some of that out. I haven't actually tested it, so I don't know, but I have seen I have seen people talking. talking about those issues as as though they are resolved or or more resolved like you said there's always going to be bottlenecks especially when talking about older hardware um the other thing i'll say is that you can get like

a 7800 and a Zen 5 board for another 300 bucks at this point or 400 bucks at this point. So like, you know, maybe if you're upgrading one, consider upgrading everything, but, but look like good, modestly priced PC hardware is kind of making a comeback. It's pretty exciting that we're back in a place where that exists. Yeah, for sure. And then the last thing I'll say is regardless of what you buy, if you want your card to last for eight years again, don't buy an eight gig card.

I don't think the cards are going to last for eight years ever again, but they cards are going to limit you really quickly based on the increasing memory consumption on especially ray tracing titles. They like Indiana Jones uses a. buttload of memory and and like i i don't see that trend reversing so it's a shame there aren't more options i mean i know that like managing multiple skews of the same gpu in the retail channel is kind of a pain probably but like it's a shame there are not or

stratified memory options on a given card for people who want, you know, like you might want a low, you might only play a 1080p or 1440, but you might want like, like what if I could get 16 gig on that card? That would be helpful. I think so for me, it's kind of unfortunate that I think actually we're a little too stratified because if you look at it, we have like on the AMD side, we have 9060, 9060 XT to 9060.

sorry, 90, 68 gig, 90, 60, 16 gig, 90, 60, X, T, 16, 90, 70, uh, 90, 70, 90, 70, X, T. Now. Those are exactly the options I was asking. Yeah. And there's every 50 bucks basically. That's, you know, that's not the worst thing. Um, I think it's really confusing though for people and in a, in a way. The old, hey, we have four SKUs, two cheap ones and two expensive ones was kind of nice. Sure.

I guess what I'm talking about is the NVIDIA attack of, hey, if you want the amount of memory you actually need, you're going to have to trade up to the next GPU that's $200 to $300 more that you kind of maybe don't actually want. I mean, and that is a problem. the 50 60 and 50 50 reviews have been really bad those are their 250 and 300 cards um to get 16 gigs i think you have to do a 50 60 ti is the lowest end card that'll do that

And in this generation, the TIs don't mean mid-cycle refreshes. They're just the in-between price SKUs with different memory configurations or higher clock speeds or something like that. it's unfortunate because the amd gpus are good enough that i wish they actually had higher price skews competing more in the 40 in the in the 50 70 and 50 80 range yes honestly like i i

I looked at when the 9070XT came out and I've been dabbling. It's been a while. It's been a few months since this project has been put on hold, but I was dabbling with desktop Linux enough that I was like, man, if I could just get slightly closer to like maybe 5080 equivalent. performance out of one of these AMD cards, I might actually switch now just for the better Linux compatibility. But it's not there. That performance isn't quite there.

Well, and the same thing on the Intel side, like I wish that they had a $400 priced card that had commensurate increase in performance. I think they don't because the next gen of that GPU is coming sooner rather than later.

is what the rumors seem to imply. But not to get off on a tangent, but for people who haven't been paying attention, the big thing on the current generation, the nine series of AMD cards, is that they added... dedicated units to do the machine learning acceleration tensor core kind of math that nvidia has had since the 20 series cards

So when you run your AI upscaling or AI frame gen now, it's not taking performance from the shader model shader units on the on the cards. It actually has dedicated hardware. So you're not like doing trade off math on that. And the performance is really good as a result. So anyway, so that's it. 10 ATI, I guess. Welcome to the club. It was a heck of a card. Real quick, one last thing I wanted to fill in here. We started to touch on this.

When you were talking about if you do want to keep one of these cards in service after these drivers are deprecated. Yeah.

Is there such a thing as security vulnerabilities in graphics drivers? I mean, I know anything can have security vulnerabilities, but is that like a... It's unusual. Is that a common thing that is actually exploited? Like it's much more that you're just... probably sacrificing game compatibility and eventually losing support for that right it's not like i think you touched on this earlier like you don't need to worry about the integrity of your system

I think tomorrow, if once the drivers stop being updated, the surface area on these 10 series cards is, is such that if there is, if there are vulnerabilities, we'll find out about them shortly after they stop updating the drivers. Okay. I I'm not going to say that it's not a problem, but it's probably fine. Yeah. But isn't it, Bill? I think I, again, I think you mentioned this. It's not like your operating system losing support, which is, which is definitely a five alarm. You need to update.

Yeah, it's it's not like it's not like if you're on an unsupported, if you're on an OS that's not supported by Chrome anymore, you got to update your OS because then your Chrome is like there's a zero day drive by exploit on Chrome right now. So, you know, like if you're on an old version of Chrome, that's a real, that's a real problem, right? With this, we're, we're fine. Yes. So yeah, I wouldn't worry about it too much, but it is a concern.

Okay. You know what I am worried about? What are you worried about, Brad? Is the image that you put in my head of retro PCs being built with 1080 Ti's in them? look it's it's if you want to play your uh physics hardware accelerated machines you put the 1080 in there you can play all the batman arkham asylum you want that's right yeah physics capes you get the hair

I just, I mean, how far out are we from these being legitimate retro cards? I think they're another 10 years, maybe. No, they're end of life now, man. Well, I know, but I mean, okay, I know I don't need to start a semantic debate about what qualifies as retro here. I like to think I like to think that multiple decades are required, like a minimum of 20 years. Let's see. You're closer to the launch of Super Mario Sunshine, the 1080.

TI is closer to the launch of Super Mario Sunshine than it is to today. Wait, I can't be right. That's not right. That's not true. Mario Galaxy, maybe? Mario Galaxy, yeah. I think, I believe the 1080 TI is roughly equidistant. What is the, the, we launch, what is the temporal version? Is there a term similar to equidistance, but for, for time rather than physical space? Chrono, Chrono, Chrono. How do you say that?

I don't know how to say that. Somebody listening to this podcast will have a legitimate answer to that question. People are screaming at their radios right now. 1080 TI, I think, might actually be roughly equidistant between Mario Galaxy and now. Why don't we have a re-release of Mario? Why can't I play Mario Galaxy in my Switch 2? Come on, Nintendo. They'll get there. Wait, didn't the... Nope. They never released it on the Wii. Oh, what are you noping to? That Mario anniversary collection.

It doesn't have Galaxy. Did it not have Galaxy? Wasn't it? I thought it was 64 Sunshine in the first Galaxy. I mean, the best part is if you didn't buy that when it came out years ago, you can no longer buy it because they removed it from sale like immediately. Is it Mario Brothers 35th anniversary one? No. I think it was the 35th. Oh, hell, it does have it. I bought that. I'm a genius. Yeah, no, it's got the first galaxy in it. Oh, hell yeah. But not Galaxy 2.

So my daughter loves, loves, loves, loves Mario 3D World, and she's never played Galaxy because the Wii wasn't a thing that she would have touched. Oh, sorry. Super Mario 3D All-Stars is the actual name of that. Yeah, I'm glad I bought that. That was a good call on my part. Yeah, because it was only on sale for like six months. It has sunshine too. Yep, sure does. You can't play Super Mario Brothers 35 anymore, can you? I think they shut that down.

If I'm not mistaken. Yes, they did actually like four years ago. And that was so much fun. Anyway, it was all right. It was cool. You know what else is fun? Supporting your favorite podcasts. That's right.

It's both satisfying and thrilling and edifying. They would not exist without you. No. Or at least this one would. Yeah, because we're listener supported. That means without you, the listener, we would not be here every week talking about. why old video cards are the best. And maybe perhaps, you know, August is just around the corner and it's 30 years since Windows 95 came out.

I thought you were about to say it's 30 years since we started this podcast because that is roughly around the time of year that this podcast also launched. It has not been 30 years since the podcast did not exist 30 years ago, Brad. We're safe on that front. Another decade. Tell that to Adam Curry. He's still out there, man. He's still he's still keeping it real and the same Adam Curry way. Yeah, maybe less real than we would like. I think he may have gotten a little unhinged, actually.

I mean, is my understanding. But then a lot of people have gotten unhinged in the last few years. A lot of that going around Gen X. Gen X has had a rough time there. Can I can I just blow my horn for a second here? Yeah, please. We were talking before this podcast about how old Windows 95 was, and I was just like, you know, that Windows 95 is going to be 30 years old this year. Uh-huh. Release date for Windows 95 came right off the dome.

August 24th. I thought it was the 25th, August 24th, 1995. I did not know that was the rattling around up there, but that's this podcast. That's that. I mean, that's why you're here, Brad. That's right. Yep. Important dates etched forever in your memory. You remember when the Battle of Hastings was? Oh, yep. Perfect. I don't even know what war that was from. Doing it right.

So, yeah, we wouldn't be here without you all the listeners. If you would like to support the show, you can for five bucks a month. You can go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, that's patreon.com slash tech pod where. you can sign up and you get access to the fabulous tech pod discord and our monthly Patreon episodes, patron episodes, where this last one, man, it was like 90 degrees in my office. I don't remember what we talked about, but people seem to like it. So you're missing out.

Yeah, that one got real rambling, but people seem to be OK with it. Yeah, exactly. I found I found the blog posts. Oh, the I think I called him a Microsoft engineer in the podcast, but Raymond Chen. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure if he was an actual engineer or what his role was on Windows product guy or something.

channel nine guy or something, right? He's a long running Microsoft blog poster, right? Yeah. So in fact, he is still at the time of this recording, his most recent blog post was yesterday, but the one I was thinking about, the one about the system tray I was thinking about was from 2003. So he's been blogging almost every day for like 20 something years. Anyway, I found that blog post and put it in the patron episode thread on the discord where he is like,

incredibly indignant about the idea of calling the clock area in Windows the system tree. You mean the taskbar notification area? Yes. He's really unhappy about the fact that that name caught on. But anyway. I mean, it's a tray and it's in the system area. Of course, it's going to. Anyway, we don't need to get into that. Our deep dive retrospective into the history of the system tray coming soon. That's right.

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