There is a rhythm to a graphics card launch: the teaser, the bar chart with the carefully chosen baseline, the number that sounds enormous and shrinks the moment you read the footnote. It repeats every cycle, and every cycle it lands a little flatter.
Diminishing returns, maximal hype
The honest raw-performance gains between generations have narrowed. So the story shifted to features — upscaling, frame generation, whatever is branded this year — which help, genuinely, but also conveniently blur the comparison to last generation's hardware.
None of this is fraud. It is just marketing doing its job against physics that stopped cooperating. The uplift is real and modest; the presentation insists it is real and enormous.
When the numbers stop being exciting, the adjectives get louder.
The practical advice has not changed in years: skip a generation, buy on price-per-frame at the resolution you actually play, and ignore the bar chart with the baseline you have to squint to find.