The game industry has been the driver for technological innovation in computer graphics for decades. This demand for greater graphics performance led to the development and advancement of discrete graphics cards. However, real innovations have largely ceased. Graphics card manufacturers are increasingly creating unneeded "innovations" in order to charge more money. Additionally, graphics card manufacturers no longer make their highest profit from gamers, but rather AI investors. This means that investments (and innovations) will shift toward AI and away from games. This is why we are seeing stagnation and even regressions in rasterization performance while every new feature uses "AI", such as scaling and frame generation.
Games themselves have also shifted in their composition. Game development companies are increasingly focused on making their games addictive in order to extract every second of attention and penny of money they can from their customers. This includes hiring psychologists and sociologists to help them manipulate their players. Because of this, many AAA games are now more addictive, but less fun than older games.
Better graphics hardware used to mean that game devs could create better experiences. That is no longer the case. When Disney started remaking its animated films as live action, it became clear that ultra-realistic CGI just isn't as expressive as cartoons. We don't need better hardware to create new experiences. We actually have all the performance we need today.
Most of the best games today are produced by indie devs who have far fewer resources than AAA studios. I think we should embrace this idea. We should pare down the scope of our games and focus on fun again. Not everyone has to do this. Go ahead and let AAA studios spend billions of dollars making games that require an RTX 5090 Trillion Super to run. There is a huge opportunity to make games that are fun that don't require insane hardware. The interest in retro games proves this. People want games that are fun, not time and wallet sinks.
Let's just ditch discrete graphics cards and make fun games.