As someone whose gaming PC is now over six years old, I am very nervous that my GPU is going to crap out on me, because I won't be able to afford to replace it.
I feel your pain. I run an RTX 2060 that I bought just before the Plague, and although it still works great on any game I own (I don't really play modern AAA games), I'm worried that I won't be able to afford a replacement if it randomly craps out on me one of these months... Especially since I make less money now than I did when I bought the components.
I replaced my 11 year old PC earlier this year, with a new 5070 on discount and only 16GB RAM. I thought it was expensive. Now prices surged like 40% since then and I regreted not getting more RAM.
<8GB gpus and below can be found at decent price. While the price are higher than they used to be a year ago for older / lower end levels it is not crazier than the price during the covid/crypto miner period for example which is probably when you built that pc.
My current GPU is a 10 GB RTX 3080. To replace it with something that isn't a downgrade, I would have to shell out at least $1,000 CAD.
I see them at a little less than 400€ in the second hand market. So expensive for their age but not hard to replace if you were willing to pay 600-700 for it in 2020.
Same boat here. I'm stuck with my 1070ti.
That's an 8GB card. For gaming (DLSS, etc.), you can still get newer 8GB cards like the 3070 which represent solid upgrades over the 1070 Ti on the used market for under $300. Still not great since similar cards were available at similar prices new a couple years ago, but at least not trading at multiples of MSRP like higher-end cards.
Even 8GB cards might start going up. I recently bought a cheap one so I can auxiliary models on it (think smaller LLMs for memory consolidation / decision models etc). Locally, multi-gpu is pretty cool. You can essentially have one GPU drive the others and do increasingly powerful things when you combine them.
You should bite the bullet now and buy a decent card on the secondhand market, before more people figure out what they have and double, even triple, the price.