Q: 'Is it worth upgrading my GPU?' - A: the corpus answers a different question - buy VRAM capacity, not compute - and declines to give a generational verdict

Nobody in this corpus answers 'upgrade or not' with a generational recommendation. What they answer instead is a capacity test. A 2024 thread predicting post-5090 price moves states the capacity framing in the clearest form available, 54 upvotes: 'For LLMs I don't see any point whatsoever unless it's at least 32GB. 48GB would be an immediate purchase, but then they'll cannibalize sales of the A4000-6000 Ada cards, unless they nerf BF16 performance, or make the TDP so high that a 1000w PSU would be required.' In the r/LocalLLaMA buy-help threads the same logic appears as a concrete minimum: '48GB minimum, and 64/72GB for higher quants and context.' And the vintage-advice form of the same answer, in the 2024 'price drops after 5090' thread: 'For LLMs I don't see any point whatsoever unless it's at least 32GB.' A separate datapoint on the discretionary half of the decision, 13 upvotes: 'A 5090 will almost certainly have higher resale value than a Strix Halo machine.'

Compute generation is not the variable that binds for inference; memory capacity is, because it decides which model fits without offload and therefore whether the workload is usable at all. The TDP and PSU constraints named in the thread are the second-order cost of moving up the capacity tiers. This is why the corpus produces no A-versus-B verdict: the answer depends entirely on whether the new part crosses a capacity threshold for the reader's model, and most generational upgrades do not.

State the VRAM target first and buy the cheapest part that meets it. Upgrade within a generation when you need capacity; across generations only when the capacity jump or a required feature (FP4 tensor cores, NVLink-equivalent bandwidth, a supported architecture in your inference engine) justifies losing the known-good stack.

One thread-level datapoint that inverts the norm and is worth flagging: people do buy multiple units of the same generation rather than upgrading. The highest-scoring comment in the RTX Pro 6000 thread (181 upvotes) is a person on their third card, and the community's own read of that reply is that it 'really make[s] the case against buying one' - at 12 upvotes. Repeated purchases of the same part are read as escalation rather than as accumulation, which is a sentiment signal a buyer should see.