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Depends on your target. The integrated GPUs from AMD these days are very good, and can run a lot of games at 720p pretty well. Discrete GPUs have also come down in price over the last year.

What happened was the pandemic created a supply chain bottleneck combined with scalpers gathering up what supply there was. The issues were worked out by the end of that generation, but then Nvidia released the next generation with prices where they assumed people would just pay that now. That's bitten them in the ass, and there's been a lot of market correction as GPUs sit on the shelf (though probably not enough).

As usual, AMD comes out looking like the good guy by being slightly less shitty than its competition. They also had elevated prices this generation, but kept it just a bit lower. Looking good by being a smidge less bad than Intel and Nvidia is a plan that's worked for them 100% of the time every time in the past, so why change it?

Modern games and hardware are expensive, but you can get an absolute slayer of titles from previous years for a steal. You won't run new games at the bleeding edge of graphics, but you don't need to.

Yeah, prices went super high during the pandemic, and prices for GPUs in particular stayed high for a while due to crypto miners. They're largely back down to earth now, though.