I kind of stopped caring about graphics at the end of the PS3 days. That was the last time were graphics made a substantial gameplay difference, namely it allowed bigger environments and more verticality (e.g. Assassins Creed). The 10 years after that it just turned into a wash, the shaders got better, we got PBR, subsurface scattering and all the jazz, but none of it really mattered. Something like Dead Space or Red Faction: Guerrilla still has more interesting interaction with enemies and environments than most modern games.

I care about graphics only in so far that you need to have enough of it to render the interactive elements of your game. Past that it’s just fluff or even detrimental, as uber realstic graphics often lead to a much harder to read game environment, as it’s no longer clear what you can interact with and what not (and ginormous floating hologram icons ain’t exactly a good solution here either).

The one area that still needs powerful graphics is Virtual Reality. The screen covering a much bigger FOV than a monitor game requires a ton more pixels to push around, as well as higher refresh rate (~4k@90fps is were it starts getting acceptable). However, VR so far still hasn’t gained any real traction in the gaming space and Facebook Meta trying monopolize it ain’t helping either. This might take quite a few more years before it becomes relevant.

These days my graphics card is mostly running StableDiffusion for AI image generation. While my gaming is mostly just 16bit games or indie stuff that could run on a 10 or 20 year old PC just fine.