That's the question a gamer that has been disgusted by miners should ask.
Can you actually offset the high price of GPU by using it to mine some cryptocurrency?
Yes, you actually can.
Even better, if you can invest on a Ryzen system, like a Ryzen R7 1700 installed on a motherboard that can have 3 GPUs on it, like MSI X370 SLI PLUS.
Install Ryzen R7 1700, install three GPUs that have dual slot requirement (like ASUS ROG Strix 570 4GB shown on the picture above, the GPU in the middle of the stack), and have them mine away some cryptocurrency.
The GPU installed on top PCIE x16 slot can be used to game. Provided you're willing to reduce the graphic quality to lowest setting possible.
I have been playing Tekken 7 with the lowest quality setting ever, on the rig shown above, using the RX 580 installed on the top slot. I don't actually need great details to play, any fighting game don't. Unfortunately I don't have screenshot of that. Will update this article when I have screenshot.
The screenshot of the game above is from a Tekken 7 session I have on my other rig, another Ryzen R7 1700 with an RX 460 4GB and two Powercolor Red Devil RX Vega 56 8 GB. I only use the vega 56 and the CPU to mine on that rig, and let the RX 460 idle most of the time so I can actually have a more decent graphic setting on that rig when playing Tekken 7.
Since your progress is saved on the steam cloud, my customizations and progress on both systems are synchronized.
For the Ryzen R7 1700 themselves, I only use six out of 8 cores to mine, I left two cores, core 0 and core 1, idle or use them when gaming.
So the question whether you can mine while gaming can be answered as YES. Provided you're mining low power algos like cryptonight or cryptonight-lite and doesn't really care about graphic quality.
Most games don't need stunning graphic quality anyway.
So mine and game at the same time, people! You can do it!