I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out.
The push for more realistic graphics was ongoing for longer than most of us can remember, and it made sense for most of its lifespan, as anyone who looked at an older game can confirm - I am a person who has fun making fun of weird looking 3D people.
But I feel games' graphics have reached the point of diminishing returns, AAA studios of today spend millions of dollars just to match the graphics' level of their previous titles - often sacrificing other, more important things on the way, and that people are unnecessarily spending lots of money on electricity consuming heat generating GPUs.
I understand getting an expensive GPU for high resolution, high refresh rate gaming but for 1080P? you shouldn't need anything more powerful than a 1080 TI for years. I think game studios should just slow down their graphical improvements, as they are unnecessary - in my opinion - and just prevent people with lower end systems from enjoying games, and who knows, maybe we will start seeing 50 watt gaming GPUs being viable and capable of running games at medium/high settings, going for cheap - even iGPUs render good graphics now.
TLDR: why pay for more and hurt the environment with higher power consumption when what we have is enough - and possibly overkill.
Note: it would be insane of me to claim that there is not a big difference between both pictures - Tomb Raider 2013 Vs Shadow of the Tomb raider 2018 - but can you really call either of them bad, especially the right picture (5 years old)?
Note 2: this is not much more that a discussion starter that is unlikely to evolve into something larger.
Its not so much the card itself, its the price and false market around it (2 versions to trick the average buyer, one with literally double the memory). Also its a downgrade from previous gen now cheaper 3070. Its corporate greed with purpose misleading. If the card was 100 € cheaper, it would be actually really good. I think that is the census on reviewers like GN but don’t quote a random dude on the Internet ahah
It's less of the fact that there is a version with double the memory and more of the fact that the one with less memory has a narrower memory bus than the previous generation resulting in worse performance than the previous generation card in certain scenarios.
I don't know about the 2 versions, but the 3070 bit is part of what I mean.
Price has been an issue with all hardware recently - even in regard to other things due to inflation in the last few years - but it's not exclusive to the 4060. But more importantly, from what I can tell, the 3070 has a 1.2x to 1.4x increase in performance in games, but it consumes about 1.75x the power (rough numbers, i'm kind busy rn). Because I don't have much time right now I can't look at prices, but when you consider the massive difference in consumption, the price different might start making more sense and only seem ridiculous if you just focus on power.