I haven’t played starfield yet but many of the recent headliner releases have been performance hogs. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to either play with lower settings or upgrade if you want to run the best possible set up. That’s why there are performance sliders in most games. When you need a 3080 to run minimum settings that’s when you start running into trouble (👀ksp 2)
At the same time my 3080 runs these games just fine with 60-90 fps at 4k with high settings. Don't need more than that for games that aren't competitive.
Man, that's why armored core blew me away. Completed the whole game, at launch, maximum settings and I don't recall a single frame drop. 3060, with very mediocre other hardware. I know there's a lot to be said about map sizes and instanced missions, but with as fantastic as that game looks and plays...
Same happened with Doom Eternal. The graphics were a show stopper when the game came out and the game didn't even stutter. It's so well optimized that I'm told you can even play it with integrated graphics.
Frankly, open world sucks. I've played Far Cry 2 sometime last year because one of my friends spoke so highly of it and I've spent more time driving around than actually shooting anything. It served no purpose other than wasting player's time. Missions were rather basic too. And nothing in the reviews of more modern examples showcase that anything has changed.
I have a 3060Ti and play most games on max settings. There is the occasional game that explodes if I do that but otherwise GPU power is out ahead of decently optimized games (probably because gaming is now no longer the driving factor for GPU performance).