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They call it ‘fine wine’ – the concept of a PC component still delivering impressive performance years on from its release. Nvidia’s Turing architecture – the RTX 20 series cards – weren’t exactly well regarded at launch back in 2018 but with the RTX 2080 Ti, I’d say we’re looking at fine wine at its best. Its performance today battles it out with the recently released RTX 5060, it has more memory than the new Nvidia offering and its outputs don’t decline on PCIe gen 3-based PCs… because it is a PCIe gen 3 card. Despite its seven year vintage, it’s still a card that outperforms the current generation consoles and even taps into some (though not all) of Nvidia’s latest neural rendering technologies. This is indeed fine wine, but fine wine with a chaser, if you like.

All of which raises an interesting question: a used RTX 2080 Ti costs pretty much the same as an RTX 5060 – so does this make it worthy as a used purchase for a budget PC? Well, AMD’s upcoming RX 9060 XT launch might have something to say about that, but yesterday’s flagship is certainly causing a headache or two for today’s 50-series mainstream offering – and emphasises the importance of an appropriate hardware balance between compute power, RT and machine learning features and available VRAM.

While the focus in this piece is about the RTX 2080 Ti, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the used market has a number of good options, all of them compliant with the DX12 Ultimate standard. AMD’s RX 6700 XT has more memory and is typically a fair amount cheaper second-hand. Meanwhile, the 16GB RX 6800 effectively solves the VRAM problem completely, but does tend to cost more than the 2080 Ti based on eBay completed sales results. In the video below, you’ll see how my benchmarking worked out with both of these AMD offerings, the RTX 5060 and the RTX 2080 Ti. Spoilers: the 2080 Ti wins on aggregate when put through our entire benchmarking suite, as the table below demonstrates. The video is worth watching for the most noteworthy results, however.

Here’s a video that shows how the RTX 2080 Ti holds up in 2025: benchmarks, custom testing, potential used purchase alternatives… it’s all in here.Watch on YouTube

Used GPUs vs RTX 5060 (FPS Averages)
1920×1080
2560×1440

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
71.0 (100%)
50.9 (100%)

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060
68.4 (96.3%)
44.3 (87.0%)

AMD Radeon RX 6800
62.4 (87.9%)
44.3 (87.0%)

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
52.6 (74.0%)
35.9 (70.5%)

How it wins is quite fascinating. In dealing with rasterisation performance without VRAM constraints, the RTX 2080 Ti is effectively a ringer for the new RTX 5060 with many games operating at close to identical frame-rates. Ray tracing is another story: in some titles, the RTX 2080 Ti performs a lot better than RTX 5060. In other tests, 2080 Ti falls a touch short. The RTX 50-series Blackwell architecture seems to struggle with some RT titles, such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and F1 24. In these scenarios, the RTX 2080 Ti can be a runaway winner. While the video above highlights the benchmarks that interested me, the results of all of our tests are aggregated into the accompanying table.

The RTX 2080 Ti also seems to answer the question of how much VRAM is appropriate for a card of this class. Even at 1080p resolution, we can find examples of the RTX 5060’s 8GB of framebuffer memory falling short, but looking at Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds specifically as examples, it highlights that while the raw horsepower is there to produce decent frame-rates with ray tracing active, you need more than 8GB to get the job done. While 12GB is more common, 11GB seems enough to make these games run well and to ace our benchmark suite where the RTX 5060 falls short.

I also spent some time doing some custom testing, similar to the RTX 5060 review, starting with PlayStation 5 console comparisons. So, here’s the thing. Generally speaking, console performance trends upwards against equivalent PC parts. The PlayStation 4’s GPU is effectively a customised Radeon HD 7850/7870 hybrid – but the results in the mid to late era of the console’s lifespan effortlessly outstrip what those GPUs produced. The RTX 2080 Ti not only predated the current-gen consoles by two years, but getting on for five years after their launch, it continues to power past their capabilities.

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I could run Forza Horizon 5 at console equivalent performance mode settings and get a significant frame-rate advantage while using Nvidia DLAA anti-aliasing for superior image quality. True, that title has a 60fps cap, so we don’t quite see full GPU potential from the console – but the results of the 2080 Ti effortlessly outstrip consoles in Black Myth: Wukong and even Alan Wake 2. The Remedy game in particular is testament to the RTX 2080 Ti’s staying power: while AMD GPUs of the era struggle to keep up, the Turing architecture delivered tech like mesh shaders years ahead of RDNA 2, so the game still runs very, very well on Nvidia’s seven-year-old vintage flagship. Alan Wake 2 also recently received an upgrade for RTX Mega Geometry – another new neural rendering technology – and yes, it runs fine on the RTX 2080 Ti.

The new DLSS transformer model upscaler also runs well on Nvidia’s original RTX flagship, losing just six percent of its performance in my testing. That said, there are hints that perhaps the RTX 2080 Ti’s longevity with cutting-edge tech may be coming to an end. Yes, you can run all the latest RTX technologies on it – bar frame generation – but while the transformer model super resolution tech runs pretty well on older cards, Turing and Ampere GPUs suffer badly with transformer model ray reconstruction, which for RT titles is what I’d call a marquee feature. Ray reconstruction, at a basic level, is essentially an upscaler for ray tracing effects and can be transformative. I found that the older version of ray reconstruction delivered a 41 percent advantage – Turing just can’t hack it.

The legacy CNN model is still fine, but it has its issues and the transformer model ray reconstruction tech really is a generation beyond. The RTX 2080 Ti can run it, but that doesn’t necessarily equate with it running well. And some neural rendering features may never appear on the older cards. At the mainstream end of today’s market with RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, frame generation and multi frame-gen are not quite the “fire and forget” FPS boosting solutions that they are on the more expensive cards. And yet, I do think they have value and are worth having when most of today’s displays have high refresh rates and VRR support.

Top-left, RTX 2080 Ti can beat RTX 5060 conclusively when a game needs more than 8GB of memory. Meanwhile, both 2080 Ti and 5060 can exceed PS5 performance – sometimes with improved settings or via DLSS. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

So, returning to the question of acquiring an RTX 2080 Ti for a budget build, there are certainly pros and cons. The RTX 5060 doesn’t have enough VRAM for its performance level, while the 2080 Ti does. The 5060 uses a PCIe 5.0 interface, but it’s cut-back to x8 rather than x16. Performance degrades on older rigs based on PCIe 3.0 CPUs and motherboards – which doesn’t affect the RTX 2080 Ti at all. However, the RTX 2080 Ti has its disadvantages beyond poor performance with DLSS transformer model ray reconstruction: no frame-gen support and an uncertain future with Nvidia’s upcoming ML features.

More to the point, we’re talking about an enormous chip based on TSMC’s 12nm process. Compared to the RTX 5060 based on TSMC 4nm, the older card sucks up twice as much power (and sometimes more!). Obviously, this will have an impact on running costs – but it also means that your PC will need to be able to handle a much larger card kicking out a lot more heat. With that in mind, if you are considering a used RTX 2080 Ti, definitely consider a larger card with a big heatsink and three fans. I used a Founders Edition card for my testing and it reminded me of the painful days where I could burn my hand when swapping out a GPU! I guess the final ‘con’ of a 2080 Ti purchase is its sheer age – first launched in 2018, a used buy could have gone through a mining boom or two.

Even so, I love the RTX 2080 Ti ‘fine wine’ narrative. While many people are still holding on to the GTX 10-series cards, the truth is that the Pascal architecture lacks the features needed for all of today’s games. The RTX 2080 Ti has them all and still manages to run demanding titles at perfectly decent frame-rates, while DLSS continues to prove its worth. While other rival cards from the era can’t run certain games and as the “8GB is enough” VRAM era comes to a close, the RTX 2080 Ti continues to deliver – and it still outpaces PS5 and Series X. Nvidia’s vision for the future of graphics tech didn’t go down well with reviewers back in 2018 but today, the balance of features, memory and performance holds up. Can we say the same for its modern equivalent, the RTX 5090? I guess I’ll let you know in 2032.

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