I swapped from an RTX 3050 to a GTX 1080 Ti, and the games I've tested seem to run better. Was this actually a worthwhile trade? I know the 1080 Ti is much older and may lack newer features, so I'm wondering what drawbacks I should expect. I still have the RTX 3050 as well.
3 Answers
The 1080 Ti can still be a strong card for older games and many current titles, but it’s nearly a decade old. It may lack newer optimizations and features, and buying a newer card such as an RTX 2070, 2080, or 3070 would generally have offered a better balance of performance, efficiency, and support.
Whether it was a good swap depends on the price and condition, but upgrading from the 3050 to the 1080 Ti isn’t automatically a bad move for raw performance. Just remember that the 1080 Ti uses around 250W, while the 3050 uses far less, so check that your power supply and cooling are suitable. Since you still have the 3050, you can compare both cards directly and keep the one that fits your games and budget better.
For traditional rasterized gaming, the GTX 1080 Ti is substantially faster than either the 6GB or 8GB RTX 3050, and its 11GB of VRAM can also help in some newer games. So the better performance you’re seeing makes sense. The tradeoffs are much higher power consumption, no modern features like DLSS or hardware ray tracing, and an older driver-support outlook.
That makes sense. I mainly noticed the higher frame rates, but I hadn’t considered power use and future driver support.