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Notes -
EVGA's transferable warranties are nuts; it's a pity they've gotten out of the market. I'll caution that in addition to the risk of getting a bad card, you're also just going to get an older one. Be prepared to replace fans in a year or so, and recognize that you're probably going to get an earlier or lower-gaming-performance model like a 1080 SC than a 1080 Ti FTW3.
That said, there is a performance benefit to some less eye-watering intermediate upgrades that won't show up in the simple frequency check or G3DMark score, even without raytracing, especially when comparing to the simpler model 1080 SCs. It's not a huge difference, especially at the price point, but for many newer and especially VR games it's the difference between a great experience and a moderate or unplayable one.
Agreed that AMD has a number of more cost-effective options for purely gaming performance points, and at more than just the gap between the highest ends.
There are also some ML models out there that can fit into 12GB VRAM but not 8GB, though I expect anyone with that use case is already aware of them, and some rendering use cases where the difference between a 30- or 40- series card and a 10-series card is pretty (bizarrely) large.
4060 Ti has 16gb of vram for 13b/20b LLM models with certain quantization. I can’t find a peer card that isn’t used with the same capacity.
Yeah, that's fair. Most of the stuff I've seen with LLMs either pushes for tiny models at low quantization for speed, or goes all the way to 65b on CPU for intelligence, but I'm sure there's a lot of use cases in the middle.
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True, but that's kind of the thing: unless you can get to a 3080, I'd argue upgrading to anything else (other than a bargain bin 10/20 series if your card is somehow even older than that) is pointless outside of those specific niches. The 3060 and 4060 are so hideously awful from a price/performance standpoint compared to everything else that I'm amazed they even exist at all, but I guess it's just a tax on people who really aren't paying attention to the reviews and/or don't trust buying used hardware.
Seriously- it's twice the price for a 20% gain (between used 1080 and new 3060/4060), but for 3-4x the price the gain is 100% (between used 1080 and used 3080). Something something Boots Theory; the high-performance cards really are that good, and that's the entire problem with them (and the reason reviewers bitch and complain about every new release that isn't the card everyone actually wants to buy, which is "a 3080 for 400USD"). Unfortunately for them, I figure next-gen consoles are probably going to stick with 4060-tier performance (like they've done for the past 10 years with their respective GPU generations) since that's the only way they'll meet their 500-dollar target price point, so the prices on the highest end cards are probably going to stay high for a long time (inb4 the 5090 is another doubling in performance over the 4090, but this time for 3500USD).
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