> The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.

I don't think that wanting to play games at the native resolution of your screen without changing settings from their defaults in order to make the game look and perform much worse is a very unreasonable "demand".

That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out

Fair, but there are 2025 games that don't run even well on the 5090. This is the fault of game developers who think they're making the next Crysis, targeting some hypothetical future hardware instead of providing a great experience on today's midrange hardware.

Looking at the best looking games from today vs 10 years ago, they're so similar it's hard to see where that extra performance is even going.

So far waiting ~5 years to bother with them has been a working strategy for me.

> That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out

That used to be possible when the most common resolution was 1080p and refresh rates weren't pushing 240hz+.

Pretty much all the lower price cards are a bad buy. Nvidia is only competitive on performance at the absolute top end, where they have no competitors. In every other price bracket they lose to AMD and Intel.