Yup, OP is a big reason I quit PC gaming.
I spent a lot of time trying to learn what the gamut of common settings do — how they impact the picture quality and performance of the game. Sources like Digital Foundry did pretty good at educating me.
But engines that power games are themselves quite different and those settings can impact performance quite differently, so maybe something like tessellation has relatively low performance impact in one game and completely tanks it in another. It's not straightforward: tessellation implementation might be far more robust in one game over the other but it's still labeled "tessellation."
Then you run into graphics features that are hardware specific, and I feel like as a consumer when I'm told that my hardware is capable of a specific feature, then I can't help but feel tempted to use it. Look at RTX and ray-tracing right now, and even by extension, the addition of ray tracing to some GTX models. Yeah, I can buy an RTX 2060 on a budget and I can toggle on ray tracing but it's very rarely a pleasant game experience — the takeaway I get from that is "I should have saved up more and sprung for the the 2080." And that feeling just constantly comes up with every piece of PC hardware because it's always better than the last thing and I really hate having my expensive, self-planned and self-assembled hardware feel like it's relatively behind already (see folks' frustration with enhanced spec consoles in some titles). But on PC it happens like once every year and a half and usually costs about the same as one game console to keep up.
And yes, it is the bleeding edge for the hardcore enthusiast and has the benefit of much more precise control, but every single AAA game I buy is this delicate tweaking and testing phase that has to account for a hugely dynamic array of hardware that's relentlessly refreshed and mixed up with higher applications of familiar features and whole new ones you have to learn about.
and I'm just like
a) I wanna be a game player, not a game scientist
and
b) even when I find the tech very amusing to follow, I feel like I don't have enough money to stay in that realm of exploration — this stuff is really rad , I hope they can cram it into the next cycle of consoles!
