The GTX 1080Ti was probably the best GPU investment I ever made. I have had nearly all the flagship Nvidia cards since the 8800 series (yeah I've been at this a while). Hell I even spent $1300 on two GTX 280's back in 2008 when they launched in hopes that I'd be able to max out Crysis and have a smooth framerate (that honestly didn't happen until I had two GTX 580's in SLI, which were damn near the same price). Even before I bought the GTX 580's I ran a single GTX 480, which replaced my SLI'ed 280's and outperformed them, although anyone that had the 480 remembers how hot that thing ran. But man it looked badass and I never had issues with it. I only wanted the 580's because they ran so much cooler and were better for SLI, which I used to love running.
When the 600 series launched I was not impressed with the 680 considering the 670 was only 7% slower. Now I was impressed with the series in general seeing as they outperformed the 500 series handily and consumed FAR less power and didn't run hot. So for that series I settled on paying $870 for two EVGA GTX 670's (still own one of those to this day and it's in the computer I build for my mom).
I skipped the 700 series due to money troubles at the time. I did find them to be some very beautiful cards though. I wanted them but I relented and my SLI'ed 670's were handling things just fine.
My next upgrade was a FE GTX 970, which were rare because for some reason all the AIB's made really cheap looking 970's for a long time and the FE cards were very nice as they used the EXACT same vapor chamber cooler the 980 used. So I spent a little more to get the FE 970 and a month later bought another one for SLI. I was BLOWN AWAY by Maxwell as it kicked the **** out of Kepler and looked so much better. Nvidia finally added some LED's to the cards and even had a sweet SLI bridge with an LED too. I loved the 970's in SLI for a long time, but that's when I started realizing that nearly all my games were only using one 970 and SLI was just dying.
Pascal comes out and it's simply amazing. It offers the best performance jump in a very long time. I thought about getting two 1080's for SLI but quickly decided against that when I saw just how damn fast the 1080Ti was. I mean it crushed the 1080 by 35% in EVERY instance. Plus it had a lot more VRAM. SLI wasn't working very good anymore, so for me it was an easy decision to just buy the 1080Ti. I bought the EVGA SC2 1080Ti which is a pretty card that has RGB as well. I remember being so blown away by the performance and the fact that it was reliable since SLI wasn't in play. I vowed to always buy the fastest GPU I could afford instead of playing with SLI in the future, since it's obviously not a priority for Nvidia or devs anymore.
Seeing the 1080Ti still regularly benching as the second fastest gaming GPU available only makes me even happier I bought this guy back in December of 2017 for $850. This was right before the prices on ALL GPU's shot up to astronomical prices thanks to miners. Literally a month later the same 1080Ti I bought was $1250 at the cheapest place. It remained that price for nearly a year!
So this is a shout out to fellow 1080Ti owners. I know you are as happy as me with this wonderful GPU. We don't usually get this kind of longevity out of a high-end GPU. Sure it will be pushed further back into obsolescence (Nvidia stopped producing it a while ago but that doesn't mean it's obsolete, that only means they want to sell their RTX series instead) when Navi comes along and Nvidia releases a Turing refresh, but even then it's still gonna be a hell of a performer. Here's to making smart decisions when purchasing insanely priced GPU's... We need to be careful with them since they lose value faster than ANYTHING else but matter most for gaming and decoding purposes.
