I've had more fun with Factorio, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and Jamestown than a lot of 3d high-fidelity games. There are a lot of modern low-spec games. Consider Clicker Heroes 2, you don't need much specs and yet its a $30 bestseller on Steam right now.
A gamer needs to ensure that they get a GPU good enough for the games they play. But if they stick with 2d platformers (and yes: good modern ones exist, like Cuphead) or other simple-graphics games, then they simply don't need to spend more than $200 on a GPU.
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There's certainly something to be said about hyper-realistic games, especially good ones like "The Witcher". But even in the great scheme of things, the games that have a lot of personality (ie: Grand Theft Auto 5) never really needed high specs to run well. And as far as I can tell, the entire point of GTA 5 is to find crazy issues with the physics engine,
install stupid mods, and laugh at the results.
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Anyway, highly visual games and story-based games aren't really my cup of tea. So I generally am able to avoid the latest-and-greatest graphical packages. But some people do dream about Star Citizen with 8k textures running on dual 4k monitors or something crazy... if for nothing else but accomplishing something that few others have done. I certainly know more than a few people who view gaming as a way to push their system to the limits... and then just run a low-spec game like Overwatch right afterwards.