Not so far different to the housing market
I already own a 3 bedroomed house, which is two more than we really need. Clearly, forking a shedload out in legal fees and stamp duty to move to a different 3 bedroomed house; probably with lower ceilings, no soundproofing, and big brother watching my meter readings so they can do targetted marketing is not in my interest.
It's not so far different to the PC at all. I own a 4-core 4GHz CPU and GPU adequate to my tastes (mostly paradoxy grand strategy titles or Dosbox). The case is nicely soundproofed, and (mostly) spyware free because Linux Mint. Pray tell what is the purpose of any upgrade against that?
RTX is little more than a tech demo. Pretty cool; but the power consumption certainly isn't. Given the compute intensity required to make real time ray-tracing work at anything other than a trivial scale; somehow I can't see this being a particularly good bet. Some top end machines can draw as much power as a hoover; and you wouldn't want to know what your bill was if you left that on 24/7.
Increasing resolutions further is all well and good; but, let's be honest, for a 25" screen there is not really a discernible difference between 1080P and 4K? Certainly not for 8K. Not too many laptops with 25" screens around. Giant TV at home? Well, OK, maybe I'll grant you there is a benefit there; but no, I'm not getting a £500+ GPU to do that.
Power efficiency might not be quite so saleable but right now; the most attractive improvements nvidia and AMD could make would be to undo the stupid charge to 800W+ PSU's that almost feel like they have become the norm in the high end market.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
