UNIT · NVIDIA · GPU
8 GB VRAMmidReviewed November 2026

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

No editorial image yet — generic vendor mark shown. Credentials in spec table below.

Top GeForce GTX Pascal card until the GTX 1080 Ti arrived in March 2017. 8 GB GDDR5X at 320 GB/s — better bandwidth than the 1070. Fits 7B Q4; 13B Q4 with offload. A pre-Turing card that still has a meaningful used-market presence.

Released 2016·Launch MSRP $599 (2016) · Now sells well below its launch price on the used market.·320 GB/s memory bandwidth
RUNLOCALAI SCORE
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286/ 1000
DD-tier
Estimated
Throughput
111/ 500
VRAM-fit
80/ 200
Ecosystem
200/ 200
Efficiency
17/ 100

Sub-scores sum to 408 / 1000. Headline = 408 × 0.70 (Estimated-confidence discount) = 286. This is an algorithmic performance-tier score — distinct from, and often lower than, the editorial “Our verdict” below, which weighs value and real-world fit (especially for hardware we haven’t measured yet). How scoring works →

Extrapolated from 320 GB/s bandwidth — 38.4 tok/s estimated. No measured benchmarks yet.

WORKLOAD FIT
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Plain-English: Comfortable for 7B chat.

7B chat✓
Comfortable
14B chat✗
Doesn't fit
32B chat✗
Doesn't fit
70B chat✗
Doesn't fit
Coding agent✗
Doesn't fit
Vision (≤8B VLM)~
Tight
Long context (32K)✗
Doesn't fit
✓Comfortable — fits with headroom
~Tight — works, no slack
△Marginal — needs aggressive quant
✗Doesn't fit usefully

Verdicts extrapolated from catalog VRAM + bandwidth + ecosystem flags. Hover any chip for the rationale. Want measured numbers? Submit your own run with runlocalai-bench --submit.

BLK · OVERVIEW

Overview

Top GeForce GTX Pascal card until the GTX 1080 Ti arrived in March 2017. 8 GB GDDR5X at 320 GB/s — better bandwidth than the 1070. Fits 7B Q4; 13B Q4 with offload. A pre-Turing card that still has a meaningful used-market presence.

Retailers we'd check:Amazon

Search-fallback link — editorial hasn't yet curated a retailer URL for this card. Check the current price with the retailer.

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BLK · SPECS

Specs

VRAM8 GB
Power draw (peak)180 W
Released2016
MSRP$599
Backends
CUDA
Vulkan

Models that fit

Open-weight models small enough to run on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with usable context.

all-MiniLM-L6-v2
0.022B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
Nomic Embed Text v1.5
0.137B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
Kokoro 82M
0.082B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
BGE Large EN v1.5
0.335B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
Qwen 3 0.6B
0.6B · qwen · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
all-mpnet-base-v2
0.109B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
XTTS v2
0.46B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
BGE Reranker v2 M3
0.57B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet

Frequently asked

What models can NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 run?

With 8GB VRAM, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 runs 7B models comfortably in Q4 quantization. See the model list below for tested combinations.

Does NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 support CUDA?

Yes — NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is an NVIDIA card with full CUDA support, the most mature local-AI backend. llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, and ExLlamaV2 all run natively.

How much does NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 cost?

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 launched at an MSRP of $599 in 2016. Now sells well below its launch price on the used market. Retail prices change often, so check the current price with a retailer before you buy.

Where next?

Buyer guides
Troubleshooting

Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify hardware specifications.