Jarred, first, thanks for your work. More than that, though, thanks for being the voice of reason in the mad house. It seems like everyone is running around, yelling at the top of their voice to get others to accept their opinion. OK, par for the course, then.
Some observations:
>Here's the thing: You don't actually need more than 8GB of VRAM for most games, when running at appropriate settings...The other part is that many of the changes between "high" and "ultra" settings — whatever they might be called — are often of the placebo variety. Maxed out settings will often drop performance 20% or more, but image quality will look nearly the same as high settings.
I agree with this. And given that both AMD & Nvidia have now set 8GB as the defacto standard VRAM allotment for the largest PC base for this generation, future PC games will be optimized for this amount, including console ports.
I'm surprised that the $300 price point is seen as a immutable number by many. Inflation in the last couple of years has been substantial in the US, and even more so elsewhere. Using the govt's CPI inflation calc (
https://bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), $299 today is worth $260 when 3060 launched (close to the 3050's $249). And 3060's $329 price then is worth $378 today, or close to 4060 Ti's launch price. In short, per inflation alone, pricing has shifted almost a tier upward. That's a considerable amount that no reviewer ever mentioned when they harp on pricing.
Some peeps are calling the 4060 grossly overpriced, and I just had to laugh. In finance, Time Value of Money (TVM) is a fundamental concept that underpins pretty much every calculation you make. It's strange that a crowd obsessed with numbers would be so ignorant of it.
<more observations later>