Core count is not all that matters, but the efficiency of these do. Console 8c/16t are from a very good architecture with lots of room to be taken advantage from, unlike the Jaguar cores. That's why our old chips are still good for gaming, because games have been made for much less quality CPUs as a base. We really don't know how long it's gonna be until devs take advantage of the higher core counts of the Zen 2 architecture, but they will eventually, this is a no brainer.
At the $300 mark you are making a decision on wether you lose PCIe 4.0 future support, or a higher core/thread count. At which point, I'd insist, if you already have a 3090, why not jumping to a 5900x and forget about this whole discussion? You get both higher cores/threads, AND PCIe 4.0 support. Costs more, but you are getting more too. 5600x and 5900x perform very similar today, but that's the key part. Today.
If we were talking about a 3070, 6800, a future 3060Ti, etc I really wouldn't even be arguing this, but if you are buying such top of the line hardware, there really isn't much point in buying a CPU that may need an upgrade sooner than the other. Just get another top of the line hardware and forget about it.
Your 4c/8t 7700k is still very good, my 4770 is still ok. How are the i5 7600k or the 4650k for CPU intensive games in comparison today?
