I have owned a 7970, 680, and just went down to a 6950 and flashed it to a 6970 and OC'ed it 900/1400. Tera, MW3, and a bunch of other games I play max out just fine still.
Not entirely sure, guess if I owned 3 monitors or something it would be worth it? I am not the kind of guy who cares about playing on max settings...
You answered your own question with the parts I quoted. On the one hand, you CAN play some games maxed out still, but some don't want to have to go through what you did to do that with a lesser card, and that lesser card being stressed to the limit, still can't equal the cards you're comparing it to once THEY are OCed.
What really makes it obvious though is your not caring about max settings, and I agree in large part, because many games look fine, even better sometimes, without all the settings maxed. For instance I don't like the heavy blur of Very High in Metro 2033, makes the game look like crap. I also don't like the heavy haze that ambient occlusion adds in Crysis on High shaders.
The things you didn't mention however, like headroom, longevity and resale value, matter a lot to enthusiast gamers. Some get their high end cards at a pretty good price, but even if you pay full price, after a year or two of use, they're going to be a lot easier to sell and probably get a higher percentage of their original value when sold used than a midrange card would
Lastly, resolution, resolution, resolution. SO many players say X cards yield same frame rates when OCed, flashed, SLIed, Xfired, etc. However we are now in times of med range cards capped at 1GB VRAM, and high end cards with 2GB or more. It's all relative to what you use them for and what you expect the future will bring, in both game development and your own hardware choices.
It would be a lot easier and much less frustrating to choose GPUs if the model cycles were longer and more predictable. If there was always say 3 yrs in between high end GPUs, a lot of people would buy them knowing they'd get decent longevity out of them. Lately the smart bastards are staggering production cycles and changing up model numbers to the point that it's almost impossible to predict how powerful or how far away the next equivalent model replacement will come though.
I don't like that it took SO long for the 670 to come out, only for it to be WELL beyond my intended budget cap, esp now that Maxwell is only 2 yrs away. I can't see sense in spending more than $300, maybe $350 max, on a GPU I'll probably only have a couple years. That said, if the 660 takes too long or isn't as powerful as I'd like, I may get sucked into a 670 anyway.
So you see, you seem to view the problem as market hype, over-choice, needless decadence, etc, while I see it as being damn hard to time and match parts without lots of costly swap outs. We see the same problem in a different way.
