I think patent laws and proprietary software supported by major OS have always had some impact, even the 90s, but yeah it’s definitely a poor state for the market to be this concentrated.

Technically Intel is also releasing some cheapo GPUs in similar capability to nVidia but they all have the same manufacturers anyways.

I’m ngl, finances had no impact on my decisions to stay at 3080. Performance and support did. Everything I want to play runs at least 60 to 180 fps with my current loadout. I’m also afraid once Windows 10 LTSC dies I won’t be able to use a high end GPU with Linux anyways.