I mean if i look the upgrading befit it's minocule

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3080-Ti-vs-Nvidia-RTX-2060S-Super/4115vs4049

sure looks impressive till you release it's only 33% faster
if you run at 60 FPS a game in theory it only runs 19 frams faster and 60 FPS is already good
if the current game runs at 40 FPS your gain is 13 frames.. see the problem the slower your current videocard runs the lower your gains get.

on top of that the price currently price is 1600$ that's triple the cost of my current videocard.
any modern videocard at the current price of 500 performance even less then my current videocard.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3060-vs-Nvidia-RTX-2060S-Super/4105vs4049

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-RX-6750-XT-vs-Nvidia-RTX-2060S-Super/m1845738vs4049

not even worth buying for the tiny gain.

so who are those people buying the current gen cards? who is the fool being rip off?.

I'm not going to say it's worth the upgrade, but the 3080 Ti is a lot better than you think.
In a more real world situation the 3080 TI is about 119% faster than the 2060s.

That's a lot of percentage.

Check out this site, it has some comparisons in FPS between the two cards:
https://www.gpucheck.com/compare/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-super-vs-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ti/intel-core-i7-8700k-3-70ghz-vs-intel-core-i9-10900k

And to be fair, they're using different CPUs so it isn't a direct comparison, just a ballpark.

People aren't buying new GPUs right now, not because they are worthless but because they have fucking insane prices.

Hopefully NVIDIA will lose a fuckload of money with the Ada Lovelace fiasco, so they will return to Earth with more human prices for their shit.

I do upgrade my GPU from time to time, maybe once every 5~10 years.

But I am obviously never going to put a 4 digit sum into one, the last I bought is a 2015 model that costed something around 200$. And I do not plan to replace it anytime soon, as it is already able to run most of the games I am interested in at the maximum level of graphics detail proposed.

Too much nuance, I can't handle this!

I have upgraded my GPU and sometimes even carried it over to my next platform (CPU+RAM+MB). Of course, if you buy a high end GPU when you buy/build your PC, it might be so that the whole PC is too old when your new games are held back or unplayable and a GPU upgrade would be severely held back by the rest of your PC.

Sometimes your GPU, or some other replacable part, breaks and you are forced to get another, which may be better.

I would love something that supports ray tracing well enough to play games smoothly but the cheapest new generation GPU I can find is an RTX 4080 for €1500 (VAT included) unless we count Intel's hard to find GPUs. A sum I guess I could afford if I stopped eating and using electricity for eight months. Gives me an idea to try living without my fridge/freezer combo until power prices come down again.

It's not as simple as you think. There are lots of scenarios where upgrading makes sense. For example, someone who has a 9 or 10 series; getting a 30 series makes sense (although less so when you consider the 40 series is coming out soon). If your GPU breaks, getting a new one makes sense. And so on.

Ultimately, when upgrading, you need to look at what you're running today and what you want to run in the future and whether it makes sense for the pounds that an upgrade costs. Of course, you also need to think about whether running a 3080Ti is a sensible decision from a pound per FPS perspective.

So, as ever, it's much more complex than a superficial look can explain.

fair amount of people out there (like me) stuck with a "budget" (overpriced) 2gb card due to scalpers / pandemic shipping / scarcity issues etc from the last couple of years. def upgrading when i can afford it. even a 4gb card would change things a good deal for me.

So yeah, totally agree with you.

9 series? you mean the 950? then yea even a 3050 cheapest version would be a upgrade but after that the prices are so artifical upgrading becomes worthless.
https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-950-vs-Nvidia-RTX-3050/3510vs4127

would you ever upgrade a card paying again 800$ to gain like what 20% more speed?.

You're putting a lot of stock on some synthetic benchmark website's dubiously robust testing methodology.

Well it depends what resolution you are trying to push. And though 60 FPS looks decent, once you've seen what a game looks like at significantly faster refresh rates it can be hard to accept 60FPS afterwards believe it or not.

Once you hit 120hz it's may be diminishing returns beyond that point but you can absolutely appreciate the difference beyond 60 FPS.

Also some people do encoding/decoding that only may be supported on newer chips (AV1 for example) or they may need more power for VR or AI stuff.

That's exactly what i did, swapped a GTX 970 for a 3060 TI and my 2015 machine is good to go until 2025. The 400€ i dropped on the card will give me considerably more latitude for the next 3 years at which point i'm planning to retire my current pc (but likely not the 3060 TI, since ii plan to stick with1080p it may very well go into the new PC)

Well, there's your answer. It's pretty obvious that most people that already have a reasonably up-to-date card (and that can afford it) are not going to purchase the latest cards, unless it's a higher model in that range (compared to where their current card ranks in its range). So, it will most likely be those that have much older cards that do the purchasing, and will see much more benefit in a recent upgrade, as long as they are prepared to pay the extortionate prices expected of them. Though there are some that just have to have the latest, and upgrade anyway, no matter what... *rolleyes*

I don't know what exactly you did with your calculator, but... don't do it again! You're numbers are horribly wrong.

Well you know, if i turn off all the visual effects and have it running on minimum settings, i can get 10,000% increase for no cost at all!
/sarcasm

But let's be serious a moment. The processing you're looking at is likely for a lot of things, from Trigonometry floating point for the 3D models, but then for many other things. AA, lighting, reflections, shadows, ray tracing (possibly), post-effects, etc etc.

A handful of extra frames may make a huge difference. And the extra processing available during difficult to render spots may smooth out the feed.

Or maybe it makes no difference at all.

If you really need the gain though you adjust your video settings until you balance resolution vs effects vs speed and find a good middle ground you're happy with. Many older games to run 'as fast as possible' didn't have lighting effects or many effects on modern games, and can be said to 'run on a potato' because of it. Some games even had fixed FPS they were working towards (24 for Diablo, 30 in some other games) where because they weren't expecting higher framerates or variable ones, so the delta (time difference between the frame told to render to now) for updating the game was skipped. (though that meant they couldn't be raised/lowered from the fixed expected speed, some games released at 30fps sometimes are updated to run at 60fps due to high demand. Hyperlight Drifter comes to mind.)

If gaming is your life, and you play online FPS games where every millisecond counts, then yeah I'm sure upgrading even a 'minuscule' can make or break your game. Singleplayer and not so intensive games, not so much.

Actually there was also a video from Linus Tech Tips where they did some tests with a high speed camera; 60fps vs 240fps (i think, might have been as slow as 100fps) and the higher rate monitors and GPU's did make reactions on seeing/acting/hitting a target easier (effectively getting it 3-5 frames sooner).