You mean the 4070, not the 4070Ti ? Here, there is about 100$ price difference between a 6800XT and a 6950. I am currently split between a RTX 4070 that draws 200W and has DLSS3 and a RX6950 that pulls double the wattage but has 16GB of vRAM. A 7800XT with 16GB and 200W, and priced close to RTX4070 would have been the ideal card for me.
No they won't. Neither AMD nor Nvidia will lower prices more than they have. And you don't have to be "rich" to afford a 500-1000USD/Euro card, it's not a bloody 70-100K sports car
There is the second hand market, if you are so tight on your budget. You can get good deals on hardware if look every day. But calling everyone "stupid" will get you nowhere.
You have to be rich to buy $1000 dollar GPU's lets be honest or alternatively a bum who still lives at his parents basement and doesn't contribute to the house at all and mommy still makes them food even though they are 30 years old! So if your only expense is PC gaming and internet bill and mommy and daddy let you stay at their basement rent free and even buy and make all your food, then maybe you can afford $1000 for a GPU.
If you have your own apartment and bills to pay and food to buy and whatnot, then $500 to $1000 is a big stretch!
Everyone isn't stupid, there are those bums as I've said who still live with their parents rent free and who's only expenditure is gaming and thus they can afford unreasonable prices!
So you want more VRAM (presumably for future-proofing), but you don't want RT (again, presumably because it adds nothing to future-proofing). Is that right?
Hate it all you want, but once you flip on DLSS3, your Nvidia card will generate more frames per second. If more fps isn't something worth paying more*, I don't know what is. Those features add value. Not to you, apparently, but that doesn't means everyone else should ignore them because you do.
*I mean paying more in the general sense, not at these stupid prices in particular.
Those are fake frames which cause screen delay, if you played any sort of multiplayer game you'll know! You don't want fuzzy generated frames that add input latency and cause a screen delay. That fake frame doesn't add anything of value, it's just a tacked-on frame that often times will negatively impact your gaming experience, especially in multiplayer games where you want a competitive advantage!
Play counter strike, play Dota, play Overwatch, Call of Duty, etc... you don't want fake frames negatively impacting your gameplay! In fact, you want the effects and animation to be over quickly, so you have a clearer view, rather than having more fake interpolated frames cluttering up the image!
DLSS 3 fake interpolated frames don't actually improve your gaming experience and they are very limited when you can use them! If the game already runs at 60fps or bellow you can't use it, it will cause all sorts of issues to the image and if you are already running more than 120 frames per second you don't need extra frames as you will be limited by your monitor output or just pc latency output.
The simple way to think about this is you see a slightly smoother image, but the feeling is crooked! You feel the added input latency, you feel like your movements and actions don't correspond to the image you are seeing. That is the issue with fake frames and Nvidia can only provide you with fake frames, because they can't offer you improved performance over previous generations, they are not giving you more Vram, they are not giving you more value, so they have to rely on fake frames and gimmicks and to fool you into buying their overpriced turds!