I mean, it is going to be 'feels like' because there is no qualification that sets apart the card tiers. The metric is more to do with the fact that as a gamer you could realistically upgrade every second generation to a mid-range card and be good playing AAA games until you have to repeat. The pandemic shortage completely destroyed that and made gamers realize how much they are at the mercy of a very specialized market -- which hasn't been a problem until desktop GPU chips became really useful for things besides gaming like crypto mining and AI.
Suddenly the gamers got put on the back burner and start paying the real market value for essentially magic tiny supercomputers used exclusively for entertainment by (comparatively) rich young men.
Oh, and gamers are notoriously belligerent about anything that involves choice, taste, or change to any of them, or critique of any of them. This is the community that would regularly bully, berate, and harass others because of a choice of hardware brand -- and call SWAT teams to grief other players.
This is not meant to be insulting or the minimize how much it sucks to have your hobby get made worse and sometimes impossible -- I am suffering to and it sucks, but I also acknowledge the truth of the matter. From the outside, all parties in the GPU drama look terrible.
Gamers can be pretty toxic, but I feel this this post is projecting a little much. It's not like the market in general is broken. AMD is releasing great cards and Intel is catching up fast. The value proposition of GeForce cards is just not there.
Suddenly the gamers got put on the back burner and start paying the real market value for essentially magic tiny supercomputers used exclusively for entertainment by (comparatively) rich young men.
Oh, and gamers are notoriously belligerent about anything that involves choice, taste, or change to any of them, or critique of any of them. This is the community that would regularly bully, berate, and harass others because of a choice of hardware brand -- and call SWAT teams to grief other players.
This is not meant to be insulting or the minimize how much it sucks to have your hobby get made worse and sometimes impossible -- I am suffering to and it sucks, but I also acknowledge the truth of the matter. From the outside, all parties in the GPU drama look terrible.