Memes

Edit: Here's another comment I made with links and more information on why this is going to be more common going forward. There's a very real and technical reason for using these new rendering strategies and it's why we'll start seeing more and more games require at least an RTX series card.

You're misunderstanding the issue. As much as "RTX OFF, RTX ON" is a meme, the RTX series of cards genuinely introduced improvements to rendering techniques that were previously impossible to pull-off with acceptable performance, and more and more games are making use of them.

Alan Wake 2 is a great example of this. The game runs like ass on 1080tis on low because the 1080ti is physically incapable of performing the kind of rendering instructions they're using without a massive performance hit. Meanwhile, the RTX 2000 series cards are perfectly capable of doing it. Digital Foundry's Alan Wake 2 review goes a bit more in depth about it, it's worth a watch.

If you aren't going to play anything that came out after 2023, you're probably going to be fine with a 1080ti, because it was a great card, but we're definitely hitting the point where technology is moving to different rendering standards that it doesn't handle as well.