On the other hand, the moment you get a 3060 (Ti), you still get decent performance. A good 20% faster than a flagship card like the 1080Ti, which is still lauded by many.
Thing is, at 1440p you don’t need a 4080 or 4090 at all. So you can often do some ray tracing with a 3080 or higher, or get 140+ fps on screen with rasterized graphics.
The 2080Ti was able to do this before.
Where the 3080Ti / 3090 etc. It was actually the first truly 4K worthy hardware, you quickly ran into the limitations. You didn’t need such hardware for “normal” resolutions, the difference between 150 and 220 fps is ultimately not something you need as a user.
The 4000 and 7000 series cards are really only good for 2 things: high resolutions or RT/PT gaming. For example, if you have a 4K 120Hz screen or if you want to maximize Raytracing 3440×1440. Whether it’s worth it is up to you.
AMD’s 7900 cards therefore lose their market a bit; the 6950 was actually quite fast in everything but RT, and the 7900 is much faster, but stuck at the RTX3080 level.
Anyway, how much worse is a 3060 like that really? 1080p RTX is fine, otherwise 1440p is fine too. Basically now you have a super 2080 for that price. If you sell it with the 1660Ti which also once cost €450, or a GTX 260, GTX670 etc, in my opinion you get a product with a much longer shelf life with the utility of what you can play in games with a ” more” value for money .
The high end of the market in particular is the one that now has much more space. I can’t rave about the price of the RTX4090 either, but I can appreciate that the option exists. Of course I would have preferred to see it around 1500€ compared to the current 1900-2300.
That you are no longer at the maximum for €500 is not a problem, that’s just a feeling. If you get less performance for the same money, even if it’s relative, it’s a lot worse. The 4080 is a disappointment compared to the 3080ti / 3090 cards in this respect…
