With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted datacenter compute GPUs…
It's more that back then was a better time for price to performance value. The 3000 and 4000 series cards were basically linear upgrades in terms of price to performance.
It's an indicator that there haven't been major innovations in the GPU space, besides perhaps the addition of the AI and Raytracing stuff, if you want to count those as upgrades.
RTX 3050 (which got a new 6 gb version less than a year ago) is similar to 1070 Ti in terms of performance and 1080s are of course even better. Definitely a ton of staying power, even in 2024.
I bought a secondhand 1080 a couple years ago when the crypto bubble burst finally and it's still serving my needs just fine. It could play Baldur's Gate 3 just fine on release last year, which was the last "new" game I played on it. Seems like it'll still be good for a few years to come so yeah.
That was mostly because the 20 series was so bad. Expensive, didn't perform lightyears better to justify the price, raytracing wasn't used in any games (until recently).
The 30 series was supposed to be more of a return to form, then covid + mining ruined things.
I got a 2060 super and i must say i'm very happy, i do 3d stuff so the ray tracing was plenty useful and despite it getting a bit it fairs pretty great in most games and the price was okay at the time (500 €still a bit high since it was during the bitcoin mining madness =-=")
I doubt very much it's about whether they are allowed too or not. They're the ones at the top of the hardware supply chain, designing their own chips and having them fabricated. It's them telling other companies, like Gigabyte and EVGA, what they are allowed or not allowed to do.
Hmdi 2.1 and the hdmi consortium prevented them from releasing code. It wasn't even proprietary, just based on a licensed implementation from what I understood.