Oh you really shouldn't agree with me as staying with RX 580 is certainly not wise anymore, especially with target resolution being 1440p. Thing is that GPU pricing is mental and the only one GPU worth getting nowadays ir RX 6600. It offers passable price/perf, but it's still ~350 EUR card and I'm terribly not used to paying anything more than ~200 EUR for card, so while value is technically great, the absolute price is way beyond what I would consider paying for one. That's also if I needed a card desperately, thankfully I don't, but RX 6600 is around 2x faster and also at around 2x price and at basically the same wattage. My RX 580 with just TDP slider basically beats 5500 XT at perf/watt and it comes uncomfortably close to RX 6600 perf/watt too and with UV it beats them both. That's great for me, but doesn't motivate me to consider newer hardware. And probably the most important reason against it, is just that simply I plainly don't see new games worth playing. I don't even want to spend time looking for them and would rather start playing something from 2010s. And the only games I play today are Victoria 2 and Horizon 5. Victoria 2 runs on absolute potato GPU and struggles with any CPU, even 12900K and Horizon 5 runs at medium-high settings at above 60 fps, so I lock it to 60, oh and the biggest flaw of that game is that it randomly stutters and that I apparently live in location far from MS servers, so I have 150-250 ms ping to Teredo server and that often means shitty experience. I recently got Arma CWA from GOG, which is the first Arma release, but still haven't started playing it, due to trying to solve some technical issues with mouse. It's a game from 2001 and apparently should run on potato from last decade too. So my hardware needs are rather low.
Another interesting revelation is that ~200 EUR budget only affords RX 6500 XT (actually it's now over 220 EUR) or GTX 1650 GDDR6. First is awful with PCIe 3 boards and other is too slow. So I went to eBay and local used HW shop. Local shop only had GTX 660 Ti for 36 EUR, which is great value if you are tight on cash, meanwhile eBay has early Christmas. GTX 1080, GTX 1070 or GTX 1660 Ti can all be found for less than 200 EUR or a tiny bit more. So basically you pay RX 6500 XT price for a gen or two older HW to get RX 6600 performance or better. Not only that, but sometimes you can even offer a lower price and maybe get a small discount too. That's mental. And just really shows that used cards can be worth considering, especially on budget. If I needed a card, I would be cool with taking a risk on that eBay GTX 1080. But like I said I don't need a faster card, but it's nice to know that 200 EUR budget is still not too low for something nice, not only nice, but something with higher perf/watt too, which is bonkers.
That said, new hardware has a big price problem. Looking at data, it seems that GPU makers had a bit of profiteering going on, but it was 10-15%, at most 25%, that does not explain basically 80% higher prices and it just seems that cost to make a card went up a lot, which means that this cost inflation is here to stay and that RX 6400 or RX 6500 XT were actually reasonable cards for budget, it's just that economic conditions deteriorated really that much. That's very concerning. That most likely means that truly affordable performance on budget most likely is a thing of past or nV, AMD, Intel and TSMC might take a haircut and offer something more reasonable, but there's only so much that can be cut. Let's say they cut profiteering by 20% and cut margins by 10%, gains for Intel will be only 30%, meanwhile for nV and AMD will be only 38%. Nice and all, but nowhere close to 80% or higher cost rise that already happened. This is not a complete model of expenses, as TSMC or Intel still buy materials, machines and etc. for fabs, but particularly materials tend to have close to zero margins and machinery has margins lower than semiconductors. This basically means that for at least 5 years, budget gaming is getting worse or more expensive and another 5 years might eventually just kill it as concept, which is really sad.
