1070ti Upgrade?

[UltimateNobody]

Hi everyone

So in the past year or so I've noticed my perfomance in games have gone down quite a bit.

Games I play at the moment:
- KCD2 (low settings, 60ish fps)
- Hunt Showdown (struggling to get constant 60fps on lowest settings, it gets quite bad in intense fights, so much that I quit playing after a while)

I would like to play games like Stalker 2 and Starfield, but the performance is unplayable.

I have the following specs:
i5-9600K 3.7ghz
1070ti 8gb
32gb ram

My friends suggest I upgrade to a 3080, but it is very expensive. I would like more opinions on this matter please, should I save up some more, or are there any other worth while upgrades for a 1070ti. I've seen second hand that a 1080 and 2070 is about half the price of a 3080, or would the upgrade not be worth it? I live in South Africa so our second prices are not always on par with other countries.

Thanks in advance !

[nullable]

A 1080 is too okd and loacks modern features. A 1070 ti is pretty close to 1080 performance. I would also exclude a 1080 ti unless you can get it for free.

A 2070 is pretty old too, so I might say a 3060, one of the models with more VRAM. Or a 3070 if you can find a deal. But if beggars can't be choosers a 2070 would be an improvement.

I run a mobile 3070 ti in my laptop, which would put it in 3060 desktop territory. I'm hsppy with it. I can run most games on high or medium high at 1080 or 1440p. Granted my cpu is a i7 12700h, so a bit faster than yours. But i wouldn't have a problem with a 3060 + i5 9600k. The point of upgrades is to improve performance and a gpu upgrade would.

The 3080 ti in my desktop is great too of course.

[smokerob79]

i hate to say this but going up in GPU would not be good gains do to the weak CPU.....i went from a 1070 none TI to a 3080 and even with a AMD 3700x CPU i found out i needed a 5700x or better to match the 3080.....

any card will let you see some gains but the higher up the product stack without updating the CPU means its going to be a stuttering mess.....

and yes its a massive upgrade to go from a 1070 to a 3080.....like super massive.....

[Wichtelman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBs3RwYjdFE

i think your cpu is holding you back as hunt showdown pushes all your 6 cores...

[wesnef]

Also, right now the GPU market is a mess. Lousy time to be upgrading.


https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
(they still need to update it for the new cards, but it's still useful for judging your 1070 against later gens.)

[Shaggy]

Upgrading to a 1080 from a 1070Ti would not be worth it..

Well... depending on your budget, the cost and your expectations.

[nullable]

Keep in mind, you can upgrade your GPU and if you're not happy with the gains you can start looking at a new CPU and migrate the card to a newer system. No harm in doing it piecemeal if that's what your budget requires.

Sometimes people get so fussed about avoiding non-optimal configurations they neglect the flexibility PCs afford.

[Kobs]

Funny thing is the 1070 TI is still working with many recent games and doing not so bad which brings the question what have they been doing with GPU's all this time aside from fleecing money from peoples.
I had one of those for a long time and upgraded to a 4070... yes it runs smoother but is it THAT much better.... hummm! I'd say not sure

[nullable]

The 10 series was exceptionally good. Hardware is aging out more slowly too. And a lot of gpu improvements haven't been pure rasster performance improvements.

Plus not everyone had a 10 series card mind you. There's a constant churn of upgrading and new systems peopke skip multiple generations.

At any rate I'm sure you can run games at 1440p or 4k a lot better on a 4070 than a 1070 ti. If that and all the other features don't mean anything to you, then yeah why would you value or be impressed?

[Chaosolous]

Could always just go for a 4060.

[wesnef]

A 1070 Ti is old enough that upgrading to a recent-ish lower-end card would still be a meaningful upgrade. 3060 Ti, 4060 Ti, 6700xt, 7600xt, etc. No strong need to go up to an *80-class card.

(depends on your resolution and VRAM needs, of course)

[_I_]

anything 20xx or later

nvidia no longer makes a card weaker than it

[Illusion of Progress]

The GTX 1070 Ti is practically a GTX 1080 in performance, so that one wouldn't be worth it.

The RTX 2070 Super is around a third faster than the GTX 1070 Ti. Whether that's worth it is up to you to decide.

As for the CPU, a good test would be to reduce the resolution to 720p. Does the frame rate improve from what it was at 1080p low? If not, you're likely CPU bound and an upgrade there first makes more sense. If it does improve, it would make sense to upgrade the GPU first.

Originally posted by Kobs:

Funny thing is the 1070 TI is still working with many recent games and doing not so bad which brings the question what have they been doing with GPU's all this time aside from fleecing money from peoples.
I had one of those for a long time and upgraded to a 4070... yes it runs smoother but is it THAT much better.... hummm! I'd say not sure

It depends on what games you play and what settings/frame rates you want. Anything nVidia beginning with "GTX" is not what I'd call performant in 2025. It would mostly be fine for up to older cross generational stuff, perhaps at low resolution and targeting lower frame rates, but the games made for the current generation are where it's been beginning to fall apart a lot more for the Pascal era stuff.

For example, Starfield, one of the games the thread starter mentioned, would be 30 FPS on a GTX 1070 and that's at 1080p medium[gamersnexus.net]. The GTX 1070 Ti is only so much faster. It's still basically going to be a 30 FPS medium experience. And who knows how much more the 9600K with 6 cores and no extra threads brings that down more.

The people that are holding onto these are doing so because they play older or less demanding titles where they are still sufficient, or they have already been reducing resolution/settings, not because faster hardware isn't much better. As we move forward through time, returns are diminishing, price for performance is slowing, and the existing library of PC games comprises of more older/lighter to run stuff as a percentage, so seeing older hardware remain in use is a sign of that. Not a sign that newer stuff isn't that much better.

[Nabster]

I would look at minimum 3070

[andreasaspenberg575]

there is 2 bottlenecks here: your cpu and your gpu. if you want to increase performance you have to upgrade both. if you upgrade to the i9-9900ks you will get 2 more cores and 10 more threads. i do not really know what graphics card would be best with that. i have had my rtx 2080 ti since 2019.

[Monk]

I'd start scouting out your local second hand options for a 9900k and a 3060ti or up, the cpu will be a decent upgrade and shouldn't cost too much and a 30 series card will get you solid raytracing and dlss, frame gen is currently only gir 40 series, but it may come to 30 at some point.

With the and 9060 and nvidia 5060 card series launching 'soon', there is a half decent chance that you'll find some 3060 / 70 /ti cards poping up for sale.

If you cannot push to a cpu upgrade also, overclocking will be your friend, keep voltages under 1.4 and temps under 90c though.

Good luck.