Unless you're very wealthy, chasing the AAA game peak performance on PC is becoming unattainable. You can easily get an Intel Arc B580 card for ~300 to play at

Unless you're very wealthy, chasing the AAA game peak performance on PC is becoming unattainable. You can easily get an Intel Arc B580 card for ~300 to play at 1440p regular settings, but to take advantage of the highest quality at NVIDIA 4090 or 5090 you're looking at $4000 just for the GPU. AAA games just broke their price ceiling too with Nintendo going for $80/90 regular game prices for their headliners, and Microsoft following. There are so many wonderful independent games studios that aren't competing for the top performance, or twitchy shooters that require such high hardware that it becomes serious competition for AAA. A few recent favorites that don't require anything top end hardware wise are Psychonauts 2, Balatro, Wanderstop, Kitsune Tails, Shovel Knight, Cuisineer. Since Doom: The Dark Ages requires a raytracing card, it's out of reach for me.