Gaming is no different than any other hobby now a days. How far you want to take your experience depends on how much you want to spend.
I think people forget this, or haven't had other hobbies
While the prices are kind of crazy, and the 'traditional' uplift this gen is looking small, we've seen much like this before, certainly crazy high prices for crazy halo products. The biggest bother is that we're slowly whittling away at what portion of top dog performance we get as we go down the stack, it's becoming slowly more proportionate to price.
Still, I expect certain products in the stack to punch above their weight relative to the physical hardware differences. For instance, the 4070Ti has 47% the cores, but 64% of the performance of a 4090. Likewise, the 4080 has 59% of the cores but 80% of the performance. I'd predict this to follow a similar if slightly disproportionate trend in Blackwell. For instance a 5090 is ~double a 5080, but I'd expect closer to 50% faster.
As to the hobby cost, yeah I gotta agree there, as a motorcyclist that isn't cheap at all, even once you own the bike. Good tyres relatively often, servicing, fuel, insurance, gear etc, it adds up very fast. Know anyone with a project vehicle? RIP their wallet.
I shudder to imagine at what frequency it will work, that it needs so much.
