The purchasing power of £650 in todays money is not the same as 3.5 years ago.
Inflation in the UK has zero effect on the countries where these products are made,which are usually in Asia. The RTX3000/RX6000 were launched nearly 9 months into a Global Pandemic.
Their RRPs took into account sky high GDDR6/GDDR6X pricing,high shipping prices,labour shortages due to lockdowns,high subcomponent prices due to factory shutdowns,etc.
Most of these factors are not present now with things such as VRAM dropping massively in price. Lots of other products which had issues during the Pandemic,now have much more availability and lower prices. The only thing that might have gone up is the cost of cutting edge TSMC wafers,but Nvidia is using the equivalent of an RTX3060 chip in the RTX4070TI.
In the end the price increases have zero to do with costs and all to do with greed. The last time we had a sudden jump in price or a stagnation was Turing V1 which happened right after a Mining Boom. Gamers brought this on themselves. Many paid beyond the odds during the Pandemic and Miners did the rest. Nvidia and AMD got used to the high prices. Just like in 2018.
They have made every card under £500 utter trash,to force people to spend over £500. JHH
apparently said he wanted a dGPU to cost the same as a whole console.
The reality is Gamers just cave in. You see it with all the moaning about EA,Activision-Blizzard,etc doing rubbish things but they make tons of money. Nvidia/AMD know Gamers don't have much willpower so they just need to hold their ground and do the minimum and they get a nice pay day.
I agree in the main but on the console front, prices probably won't be pushed as the main profit is in software sales and peripheral's hence why they used to sell the consoles at a loss. I can see a ps5 Pro being £500 to £550 but not much more as that's probably not going to suit there market. PC gamers were always willing to pay a lot of money from day one in comparison and manufacturers of gpu's don't have the fallback of making money from games and Peripheral's.
Sony was breaking even on the PS5 in 2021:
Sony has confirmed the PS5 Disc Edition has broken even. Overall PS5 sales have totalled 10.1 million while PS4 sales now total 116.4 million units.
www.playstationlifestyle.net
Yes,2021 when TSMC 7NM was a cutting edge node and GDDR6 memory and NAND prices were high.
PC Gamers are getting mugged by Nvidia/AMD with dGPU pricing.
The RTX2060 to RTX4060 performance jump was only 50% over three generations after four and a half years:
The jump from the RX5600XT to the RX7600 was around the same.