Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.
> Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.
This wasn't true at the time. The high-end parts just have many multiples of the compute units of the low end cards. Nvidia 3xxx isn't 100% faster than 2xxx or 1xxx on a per-unit basis, and the x080 cards have several times the compute of the x030 or 50 parts.
Another relevant concern is GPU RAM; the lower end parts just have less RAM. Game performance completely falls over if more RAM is needed than the card has. Very large displays need a ton of GPU RAM.