GTX 1080s: Revisiting Legends
Summary
GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti are revisited to test their relevance in 2026 for gaming and AI workloads. The piece chronicles a period-correct hardware setup, compares against newer GPUs, and analyzes LLM benchmarking findings (llama-bench with 12B models and smaller Qwen3) to show where older Pascal GPUs still hold value and where they fall behind. The article also discusses FP16 throughput, DP4A, CUDA version limitations, and the general aging of Pascal in the context of modern AI tooling.