Funny aside, we seem to have followed a similar upgrade path. Going back 1 further, mine was:
Intel 2500k -> Intel 9700k -> AMD 7700x, with intent to get an AMD 8800X3D or something later, as it becomes available.
Was the 9700K -> 7700X upgrade a nice jump? I've been running MSI afterburner and keeping an eye on GPU usage and am often only using ~80% while well under my monitor's FPS limit. It doesn't show any CPU cores pegged but I assume that's my bottleneck.