New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf oer dollar has been flat for a while now.

Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech

For gaming GPUs the 5090 is something like 20-50% better than the 4090 in raster performance.

Apparently also 50% more likely to make things catch on fire! ;-)

In situations where the budget matters, you need to take that 20-50% better performance and drop it by the 25% higher launch price.

And the generated frames are misleading because they don't work very well if your source framerate is low.

The generated frames thing is interesting as it's an obvious example of the whole discussion around halo products (the x080 or x090 cards), "the rich get richer", it takes up a lot of air in the room but is only appropriate for a small vocal proportion of the market.

As you say you need a good framerate to start with before generated frames make sense so either you're already running well with a high tier card and are further able to show off the combination of framerate/resolution/detail level, or running a lower tier card at lower settings turning the graphics down further which can be a very obvious trade off. Less demanding games which are generally online competitive usually wouldn't do as well with any extra latency introduced, and the situation where I've heard it would be a good fit is emulators or any kind of game where the CPU is the limiting factor

I just don't think the 5090 is for gamers; it's for hobbyist AI people who want to buy multiple to run high parameter LLMs. Fake frames are irrelevant to this crowd, even if they take one of their 5090s aside to game once in a while.

thats the only GPU that is worth the upgrade. All the other ones are meh.

Sure they are better... but once you factor for die size, core count, wattage and so on... the improvements being made are less impressive than they first seem.