That is a pretty good point. I remember the days (Geforce2 through Geforce FX) of upgrading nearly every year... and now I'm sitting on a 1070 in the Win10 box and a Radeon VII on the Linux box. Both of which i expect to last me quite a bit longer as I'm comfortable sitting at 2560x1440/1600 resolution. Even Cyberpunk does pretty well on a 1070. Before that... my GTX 580 lasted me far longer than I expected it to. I still use that in the rendering box.
Fortunately, Linux support tends to go a fair bit longer than official support does.
Yup. I used to be on the ~ annual GPU upgrade schedule. It seems extreme today but GPU's were also a fair bit cheaper then.
In October 2001 i bought the fastest GPU money could buy, a GeForce 3 TI500. It set me back $350.
It replaced my GeForce 2 GTS, which was only about a year old.
The GF3 was replaced by a GeForce 6800GT on launch. That was an extremely long time between upgrades at about 2.5 years, but was mostly because the GeForce 4 series wasn't much faster than the top GF3, and the GeForce FX generation that came after it sucked ***.
After that 6800 GT i took a bit of a break from the PC hobby. It wasn't until 2009 I picked it up again. First with a basic GeForce 9400 (i don't play games anymore) then rapidly replacing it with a fanless Radeon 5750 (ok, maybe light games) then shortly after it was a blur.
GeForce GTX 470 -> GTX 580 -> Radeon 6970 -> dual Radeon 6970's -> single Radeon 7970 -> GeForce 680
I was an early adopter of the 30" 2560x1600 screen and was constantly chasing acceptable performance at that resolution.
I didn't find it until I bought the original 6GB Kepler Titan in 2013. This is where GPU longevity started for me. I kept the Titan in my main rig (before moving it to backup duty) for two years, which I thought was long at the time.
Then I made another foolish mistake and was an early adopter of 4k and bought two 980ti's in 2015.
Those only lasted a year before being replaced with the Pascal Titan X in 2016 on launch, and I've kept that GPU ever since. 5 years is some kind of record for me.
To be fair, I considered upgrading sooner. The 2080ti appealed to me, bit the "space invaders" failures had me spooked until way too late in the game.
(My philosophy is that if I am going to spend big bucks on a top end GPU it had to be at launch or shortly after so it stays relevant longer)
The 3090 was appealing too. It's launch MSRP was a little intense at $1,499 and it did give me pause, but what has happened since then has just been stupid.
I refuse to buy any GPU above the chipmakers original MSRP for any reason, so I guess the Titan keeps chugging on...
