Latest and greatest is not what I'm after - but good performance at a reasonable wattage is. And that too is becoming a rarity.
Why are we ditching efficiency for balls to the wall wattage just to get a mere 5-10% increase (if even that) in performance? Just because it's a desktop it doesn't mean that you should crank up the wattage and that it doesn't matter since desktops have good cooling. Efficiency still matters. I've heard that 4060 = 3090 and 7600 XT = 6900 XT. Of course they have comparable performance when they also probably have comparable power draw...
Wake me up when we go back to innovating, performance, and efficiency - and not simply turning power sliders up until the GPU is at its limit and sell it as a new model.
Oh I agree. In one of my rigs I have a GTX 1660 (120w but I even undervolted that to 88w), that runs 99% of what I want to play these days. But I think they've simply hit the wall. 4k and Ray-Tracing drove up demand (as does ever decreasingly optimised games) just after all the easy per generation efficiency leaps we had with Maxwell, Pascal, etc, ended. So the only way of meeting
"I need triple the horsepower for my 4k ray-tracing" now is to triple the wattage. Personally, I find the whole rat-race ridiculous and wouldn't touch a +250w GPU with a barge pole either (it's made easier for me by losing a lot of interest in many "must have" AAA + multi-player games), but I can see why a lot of people are considering switching to console if the PC industry doesn't get its act together over the next couple of years (and start making games more efficient if the hardware's architectural efficiency has genuinely hit a hard wall).
Edit: The "canary in the coal-mine" as to 'the party is over' for massive efficiency gains has been the low-end, ie, when you ignore GPU's of different wattage (and nVidia branding-drift) and just compare "same wattage across generations", the GTX 1060 (120w, 2016)
was a huge jump over the GTX 960 (120w, 2015) after just 1 year, the GTX 1660S (120w, 2019)
was much less even after 3 years, and the RTX 3050 (120w, 2022) is
hardly any improvement at all after another 3 years. The only reason the RTX 2060 was faster than the GTX 1660 was to up the wattage to 160w. If you were to take the RTX 2060 and RTX 3060 and benchmark both capped to 120-130w, that would highlight just how "like for like" efficiency gains have slowed to a crawl since Turing...