Both in my articles, and to my friends and family, I've always preached the good word of pre-owned PC hardware, especially GPUs. With the current state of the PC component market, I've always maintained that buying used can be a great way to save a buck, and to put my money where my mouth is, I decided to throw my near-decade old GTX 1070 into my main workstation and try to game with it for a week, just to see what it'd be like. Besides some struggles driving high-resolution displays and an inability to ray-trace, the 1070 is still capable at providing a pretty adequate gaming experience.

Swapping out my RTX 5080

Out with the new... and in with the old?

This GTX 1070 belonged to my fiancée, but shortly after she hung up the mouse and keyboard, I scavenged it and threw it into my home lab to use for AI inference. It has been a fair number of years since this GPU had done any gaming, and the process of getting it to run in my Ryzen 7 7800X3D workstation wasn't totally smooth.

Physically, this card is a lot lighter and smaller than the 5080, so no anti-sag bracket is required here. After slotting it in, I immediately began having display detection issues, and I have a feeling it's due to my 4K 240Hz OLED. Driving a display of this size and refresh rate wasn't something the 1070 was designed for, but after swapping around some cables, I managed to get into Windows, where I immediately had to downgrade my Nvidia drivers to version 582.53.

Gaming on the GTX 1070 is actually fine

4K is too much to ask of it, but 1080p and even some 1440p is totally doable

Starting with my tried and true favorite, Escape From Tarkov, which is a game that had already amassed quite the player base before Pascal GPUs hit the market. I like testing this game as an example of what a CPU-bound game that still asks something of the GPU is like. I tested a PvE raid on the Ground Zero map, both for ease of reproduction and so I can easily test settings without needing to worry about other players. It's not a 1:1 for PvP performance, but it's pretty close.

At the settings I normally play at, which is at 4K and a mix of High-Medium, it's basically unplayable. It's well under the 30 FPS mark outside of action, and during it, dropping to the 20s. Turning FSR 3.0 on didn't really help much, so I decided to notch down the resolution to 1440p, where the performance jumped to well over 60 FPS. Compared to 4K, this was absolutely playable. Still not perfect, but I'd feel comfortable playing with this level of performance, and I did for a long time, before I had a top-end rig.

At 1080p, the performance is even better, creeping into high refresh rate territory. Averaging 105 FPS felt buttery smooth, but because the my monitor is a 32" 4K display, the clarity of the image seriously suffered at 1080p. On a smaller 1080p display, this would look completely fine, but it looked very blurry with my configuration.

When comparing it to my RTX 5080 4K, it's actually quite similar in terms of 1% lows. Obviously, the gap in resolution is massive here, but it's interesting to look at a graph like this. My RTX card can obviously offer a lot more in terms of DLSS compatibility and Smooth Motion, but if I swapped out my display, a GTX 1070 would still be just fine in EFT.

Even newer titles are totally fine

With the right settings tweaks, it's more than playable

I wanted to try something a bit newer. Battlefield 6 is known for its decent level of optimization, but it's a lot heavier on the GPU than Escape From Tarkov, so I figured this would be a much more interesting test.

The same story plays out here in regard to resolution. At the same settings I use on the RTX card, the GTX card seriously struggles, only registering 26 FPS on average. Moving to 1440p on the Low preset, we reach a much more playable 45 FPS on average, but the 1% lows are still tanking the experience. 1080p finally delivers a playable experience, registering 72 FPS on average. The 0.1% lows recorded in my tests at 1080p must've been lower due to a particularly heavy graphical sequence, as I was playing online for this test.

This is a game where I definitely miss my RTX 5080, as it completely wipes the floor with the GTX 1070. With that said, I was surprised at just how playable the game was on the older card.

Finally, the final title I frequently played during the week is Counter-Strike 2, and I knew this would be totally fine on the Pascal card. At the same high-ish settings as my RTX card, it struggled, but when I turned the resolution down, the FPS was well above my monitor's refresh rate, and the game felt totally indistinguishable from the newer card.

The downsides

Besides performance, there were some quirks

The GTX 1070 surprised me with its performance, but there were some serious downsides to running this card for an entire week. For one thing, I couldn't get my secondary 1440p monitor to light up concurrently with my 4K display. I'm not sure if this was a strict limitation of the card or not, but at some point I had just stopped trying to make it work.

Secondly, for both HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, I could only drive 120Hz at 4K. I suspect that this is a hard limitation of the GTX 1070, but despite running at 240Hz for the last 8 years or so, I had stopped noticing the lower refresh rate after a while.

I had also experienced some crazy artifacting in Battlefield 6 when trying to use any kind of software upscaler. I'm not sure if this is a known problem or not, but I was limited to running everything at native in that title.

Perhaps the biggest downside to running a card this old is the complete lack of RT ability. This bars it from certain games entirely, which could be a drag for some users. For me personally, I don't like turning RT on, so in games where turning it off completely is still supported, this card would likely run just fine.

A blast from the past

For a GPU that's about to turn 10 years old, it's still pretty good at running games. I didn't test anything crazy new, but in the games I frequently play daily, it was surprisingly capable. I'd still be lying if I said I didn't miss my RTX 5080, and if you're still on a GTX card, I salute you.