I don't mean to sound ignorant, but how is any GPU comparable to a console.

For $500, I can get: a Series X and a controller, ready to play out of the box. With GamePass (currently $1 first month), I get instant access to a large library of games.

A current GPU (20, 30, or 40 -series) costs more than that, and I also need to purchase the additional components to put it all together.

I built a PC in college because it used to be the most cost effective option. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. These 40-series prices will define the cost for the next generation of cards, and IMO its too much to justify for casual gaming.

PC is really the only place where you get super high end framerates+resolution+graphics-fidelity combinations. It's only really cost effective if you upgrade slowly—a new cpu here, a new GPU there, amortizing the costs over the years. And the nvidia xx80/xx90 models are never the ones you'd buy if you are trying to be cost-effective. They are high end damn-the-money-just-give-me-all-the-graphics cards.

[1] maybe back in the era where the PS3 was $600, but even then a xbox 360 was cheaper and mostly just as good fidelity-wise.

Roughly the same time as the 360 era I built a PC for uni, and the extra cost to get console-beating parts (and adding in that PC games were cheaper or pirated) was way better value.

Now Im not sure what I would do in the same position, a laptop and console costs significantly less than a PC that even matches it, and unis mostly stopped having any focus on CAD

No it doesn't. An RTX 3060 brand new is under $500. So is a 6700 XT. If we're talking used, RTX 2060's are $200.

Now, are consoles cheaper if all you care about is playing games and nothing else? Sure. But that's always been true. Usually the pro-PC argument is either because you want the flexiblity of PC gaming (that is, your games last longer, you've got things like steam sales, mod support, you want better-than-console quality & performance, etc...), or you already were going to have a PC at which point take the money you would have spent on a console and just add it to the PC in the form of a GPU. In a world of increasingly fewer PCs as a household item, being replaced with laptops & phones, that's less true than it used to be. But ymmv.

> With GamePass (currently $1 first month), I get instant access to a large library of games.

You get that on PC, too https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/pc-game-pass

Yeah, but as far as I know that requires making your Windows login a Microsoft account, and frankly I'd rather risk giving piracy malware. I already pay for Game Pass Ultimate but I've long since excised Microsoft's tentacles from my desktop.

What's not computing for you?

PC Part Picker doesn't seem to think so: https://pcpartpicker.com/builds/#X=0,70000&sort=price

Console optimizations these days is mostly just dialing in the settings & using liberal amounts of up-scaling (which the PC versions also often support, but is disabled by default)

For perspective, a PS5 is about the performance of a GTX 1070, give or take. So a 3080/4080 are far far better performance than that.

If you already have PC parts, you could potentially upgrade to a 3060Ti for $400 (minus whatever you can sell your current GPU for) and get better perf than a console.

Otherwise, you're right. Starting from scratch, consoles are a better value, unless you really really want the best performance.

In other words, the name is utter bollocks because the 12GiB model has approximately 1.26 times the cuda cores of the 8GiB version for approx 0.96 times the core clock. Assuming no other bottleneck exists, the 12GiB version should be 1.21 times faster. This is supposed to be the xx70 and xx80 difference.