+1
I agree, the top end of the graphics card stack is completely losing it's way on power consumption, heat generation and on the consumer price tag.
They have become niche halo products that should be mostly avoided and certainly not recommended.
This generation our top end recommendation stopped at the 3080, but our most popular sellers by far have been the 3070, followed by the 3060 Ti and then the previous gen 1660 Super.
We have sold next to no 3090's and very few people asked after them, and those that did were put off by the price.
Times change. When I was a child in 1999, I remember the absolute top end GPU's being the Voodoo3 3000 (which I was lucky enough to own) and then the Geforce 256. Both didn't need a power connector. TDP for the Voodoo 3 was just 15W. If you'd have mentioned to people that the mainstream 3080 in 2022 was 320W, they'd have thought that was absolutely crazy.
The same thing is happening now, clearly made apparent by the introduction of the 600W new PCI-Ev5 power connector.
IMO PC gaming has been headed more towards the high end, enthusiast, exclusive and expensive domain for a few years. This will be exacerbated by the rising energy prices, making high end PC gaming exclusively for high end wallets. I don't think this is a good thing, but that's what's happening.
There'll be some (older generation) that will stick to older, dated resolusions such as 720P, 1080P, 1440P, as these don't require anywhere near as much power and still deliver a 'good' experience to them. Remember there were many that kept using black and white TV's, long after colour was available. This isn't quite a black and white (LOL), though is still a similar affair.
Of course no-where near the detail/IQ that a much more expensive, power hungry 4k HDR experience can offer, though this is undeniably what the industry is pushing towards.
Consoles aren’t immune to this either, gaming power consumption of the playstation is also ramping up:
PlayStation 1: 3 Watts
PlayStation 2: 46 Watts
PlayStation 3: 120 Watts
PlayStation 4: 140 Watts
Playstation 5: 200Watts