I don't do game dev, but FWIW those $400-$800 mini gaming PCs on Amazon are surprisingly decent, with extremely low power consumption, and many of which have eGPU support if necessary. I've become extremely conscious about power usage in the last few months and so I've been replacing my servers with them.
I started using one as a home theater PC about a week ago, and even the internal GPU has been pretty solid. I was able to do 4k video editing with Lightworks Pro with no trouble; I had trouble getting Stable Diffusion working but that was more of a software-support-on-NixOS thing than "crappy hardware" thing.
I don't play a ton of new games but I did PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation on there and for the most part the frame rate was pretty stable, and I've read that a lot of people are having decent luck with even relatively modern games like Elden Ring.
Yeah fair, I've never actually used an eGPU so it's tough for me to directly endorse them. I know people who have had pretty good luck with them but I don't really know many game devs so I don't know how well they would actually work with that.
The only thing I do that gives serious use to the GPU is hobbyist video editing, and I don't do that terribly often anymore. I do sometimes run Stable Diffusion, but that's mostly as a goof to generate funny pictures of Keanu Reeves. For that stuff, I think even a relatively cheap GPU does the job well enough.
I started using one as a home theater PC about a week ago, and even the internal GPU has been pretty solid. I was able to do 4k video editing with Lightworks Pro with no trouble; I had trouble getting Stable Diffusion working but that was more of a software-support-on-NixOS thing than "crappy hardware" thing.
I don't play a ton of new games but I did PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation on there and for the most part the frame rate was pretty stable, and I've read that a lot of people are having decent luck with even relatively modern games like Elden Ring.