alt Hacker News> only really faster and better if you don't use them for gaming, unfortunately. Upscaling and frame generation is not a better GPU, it's one with a band-aid applied to hide the fact that it actually did not get much faster.
The generations gains haven’t been as great as past generations, but it’s getting silly to claim that GPUs aren’t getting faster for gaming.
Intentionally ignoring frame generation and DLSS up scaling also feels petty. Using those features to get 150-200fps at 4K is actually a very amazing experience, even if the purists turn their noses up at it.
The used GPU market is relatively good at calibrating for relative gaming performance. If new GPUs weren’t actually faster then old GPUs wouldn’t be depreciating much. Yet you can pick up 3000 series GPUs very cheaply right now (except maybe the 3090 which is prized for its large VRAM, though still cheap). Even 4000 series are getting cheap.
"Guessing what a pixel's color might be were one to actually do the work and render it" is not the same as actually rendering it. No, upscaling doesn't count.
Doing it for a whole screenful of pixels, for the majority of frames (with multi-frame generation) is even less of it.