I've actually reversed my GPU buying logic from the old days. I used to buy the most powerful bleeding edge GPU I could afford. Now I buy the minimum viable one for the games I play, and only bother to upgrade if a new game requires a higher minimum viable GPU spec. Also I generally favor gameplay over graphics, which makes this strategy viable.
I'm generally a 1080p@60hz gamer and my 3060 Ti is overpowered for a lot of the games I play. However, there are an increasing number of titles being released over the past couple of years where even on medium settings the card struggles to keep a consistent 60 fps frame rate.
I've wanted to upgrade but overall I'm more concerned about power consumption than raw total performance and each successive generation of GPUs from nVidia seems to be going the wrong direction.
That's probably not going to be an option for me as I wanted to upgrade to something with 16 GB of vram. I do toy with running LLM inference and squeezing models to fit in 8 GB vram is painful. Since the 5070 non-ti has 12 GB of vram there is no hope that a 5060 would have more vram than that. So, at a minimum I'm stuck with the prospect of upgrading to a 5070 ti.
That's not the end of the world for me if I move to a 5070 ti and you are quite correct that I can downclock/undervolt to keep a handle on power consumption. The price makes it a bit of a hard pill to swallow though.
I feel similarly; I just picked up a second hand 6600 XT (similar performance to 3060) and I feel like it would be a while before I'd be tempted to upgrade, and certainly not for $500+, much less thousands.
