Hey yall, with card prices getting out of hand these days and my 1080 nearing the end of its viability, im looking to upgrade my GPU by making a responsible decision that invests in the guture but also isnt $2000. Buying a 5060 feels like a poor future investment but a 5080 prices are absurd. My 1080 is still running without issue but I've exhausted the batch of older games Im interested in and would like to play some newer games with non-dismal settings. For example, I bought Stalker 2 and even with optimized settings, im only getting 45fps. Its playable but could and should be a much better experience (slava Ukraini). That being said, i just played through elder ring on high and had no issues. Im not asking for 200fps in 8k, but my monitors are sad from my card bottleneck.

I also have 2 computers. My old rig with 2018 cpu slots and my wife's new computer with ddr5/current cpu slots. Id likely be trying the new card in my old rig to see how my CPU bottleneck is and if thats bad, I'll just toss it on hers. Note: she's running a 1080 as well because i used to have SLI 1080s until games stopped supporting it and built her a computer around it in 2024

My rig Specs:

GTX 1080

i7-6700

500gb SSD

32gb DDR4

Wife's rig Specs:

GTX 1080

i5-12400

2tb SSD

32gb DDR5

Anyway, like I stated before, looking for a card thats a lot of bang for your buck and will let me play current games into the future. Will spend up to ~$1K and ray tracing means nothing to me. Open to any company that'll fit in the slot.