Rumor mill: Is Nvidia digging up more of its back catalog to ease the graphics card shortage crisis? If a recent rumor turns out to be accurate, the next product in line for a revival is a former consumer flagship: the GTX 1080 Ti.
The rumor, and that's all it is right now, comes from regular leaker Harukaze5719 (via PCGamesN). They spotted a post on Korean hardware forum Quasarzone suggesting the card, launched in March 2017, could be given a new lease of life.
A forum member writes that they returned their old card for an RMA as it was still in the three-year warranty. Nothing unusual there, but the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti they received in return was brand-new, with a manufacturing date of 2021.
This doesn't mean that the Pascal card is definitely being resurrected; it could be that these new cards are a small batch made for warranty replacements, and the internet does have a bit of a reputation for fakery. However, history tells us that a GTX 1080 Ti re-release is a strong possibility.
The global chip shortage, cryptominers, and scalpers have created a perfect storm in which buying a new graphics card has become a near-impossible and costly task. The situation has led to Nvidia resuming production of the GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1650, and RTX 2060 in the hope of getting more cards into the hands of gamers.
The GTX 1080 Ti remains popular today. If a relaunch does happen, expect the card to move up from its current 18th position on the Steam Hardware Survey. It still stacks up well against recent releases---check out our feature last year that compared it against the RTX 2070 and Radeon 5700 XT, where it offered similar performance to the Turing GPU. And see how the GTX 1080 Ti fares against the GTX 980 Ti and RTX 2080 Ti.
