It wasn't really parts it was the overall point/narrative. I'll try and explain it in simple (yet long winded) terms.
Back in the day (TM) computers had single colour screens, green on black (I'm going somewhere with this) then came the era of Colour Graphics Adapters (CGA) video adapters with four different colours on the screen at once, then came the era of Enhanced Graphics Adapters (EGA) with 16 colours. This improvement from CGA to EGA could be directly compared with going from an Atari 2600 to a NES, and this is where I started with a 8086 computer with EGA display. Next came the Video Graphics Array (VGA) cards, which could display 256 colours at once (comparable to the NES to SNES transition) however my father wasn't going to drop a grand on a new video card just to make my games look cooler when WordPerfect and Supercalc (the DOS programs Word and Excel are ripped off from) would look the same. The next big jump was 16bit colour (even more colours again), then 3DFX invented 3D accelerators, then SLI which allowed games to be played in 800x600 and the mentally high 1024x768. Finally the last big advancement was hardware based Transform, clipping, and lighting (T&L) which was responsible for the rise of Nvidia and the fall of 3DFX, and that was the last major development in GPU technology, there hasn't been anything big since just improvements on what we have.
And this is the crux of it, every time one of those landmark developments hit the market I couldn't afford it, I had to wait a year or two until the tech trickled down to the cheaper video cards, I'd always wish I could get in on it sooner but couldn't. This time however I can afford it, gimping my own experience for a year or two just to save money isn't how I want to go with my hobby so I'm getting a 2080ti, because as cheesy as it sounds, THG are right, when my life flashes before my eyes I want as much of it to have ray tracing as possible xD