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And it would be fine even for enthusiasts. Look, I love my 5090, I love that I am in a position in life where I can have stupid expensive shit for my hobby... but I also recognize that I can have plenty of fun without it. My laptop has a mobile 4080 so 12GB so about a 4070-4070ti, right in the main stream of what you see on Steam... And it is completely fine and is a good gaming experience. No I don't get all the shinies, but it works just fine. I can and do easily play and have fun on it when the desktop isn't available for various reasons. There are plenty of games I can play on even less, and still have fun.Yeah, I think some people forget this forum has A LOT of enthusiasts... 5080 and below for a majority of gamers out there is more than fine. If this was not a main hobby of mine I work for, I would not have half the equipment I have...
It's a big difference between "I like having this," and "If I can't have this the hobby isn't fun."
Hell, I've been a gamer since before I can remember, and a PC enthusiast since I was 12 and during most of that time, I didn't get to have the highest end card, and back then the highest end wasn't even as high end as the 90 cards. I had a top of the line system with dual Voodoo2 12MBs for awhile, but after that it was all most midrange. I had a GeForce 3 Ti 200, a Radeon 9800 SE, a GeForce 8800 GTS, a GeForce 570, etc. Not an all inclusive list (I can't remember all of them), but in general: Not the top end, at least one slot down, and I didn't upgrade every generation, every other at most. I didn't get a top of the line card until the 1080Ti, and of course that is in line with the 5080, not the 5090. It wasn't until the 3090 that I both had and decided to spend the money to just go all out.
Please don't misunderstand: I'm not happy about datacenter companies buying every fucking GPU and stick of memory. It is annoying as hell, worse than the cryptomining days, but saying that gaming is coming to an end because you can't have a super expensive halo product is silly. I mean even if they were ever available at MSRP (which they really weren't) $2000 for a GPU is a nice product. Most people aren't going to be able ot afford one, and many people who can aren't going to choose to afford one. Hence games WILL work fine on lesser hardware.
I love 4k, I love high FPS, I love path tracing. However I can have fun without all those things. It won't ruin the hobby for me.