You can ride the component power curve two different ways.
Realize that, on average, your GPU will lose 1 level per generation (780ti>980>1070). This can vary up or down in exact perfromance difference depending on architecture differences or versions of cards or other factors... but is generally reasonable.
You can either Buy expensive hardware so for more gemerations you have enough power to play New AAA games at ever decreasing settings. Or you can buy the opposite way and play older AAA games bought for less money are less expensive hardware with performance that only higher end hardware whould have gotten you (at the time the game came out).
If you buy mid range hardware then you simply go from "just" able to play current games to "not" able to play current games much quicker and it will cost you more in the long run trying to save money buying "cheap" to play "new".
As far as emulation goes Intel has been lazy and only made modest gains ofer the last few generations so a lot of older Intel CPUs are still fine for quite a few emulators. AMD had a massive single threaded performance deficit to overcome and really only got to a reasonable level with their latest offering. (To be fair native computer games are nowhere near as CPU heavy as emulators [there are some exceptions] are so for [most] native computer games AMD CPUs were a decent value..... just not for emulation)
Realize that, on average, your GPU will lose 1 level per generation (780ti>980>1070). This can vary up or down in exact perfromance difference depending on architecture differences or versions of cards or other factors... but is generally reasonable.
You can either Buy expensive hardware so for more gemerations you have enough power to play New AAA games at ever decreasing settings. Or you can buy the opposite way and play older AAA games bought for less money are less expensive hardware with performance that only higher end hardware whould have gotten you (at the time the game came out).
If you buy mid range hardware then you simply go from "just" able to play current games to "not" able to play current games much quicker and it will cost you more in the long run trying to save money buying "cheap" to play "new".
As far as emulation goes Intel has been lazy and only made modest gains ofer the last few generations so a lot of older Intel CPUs are still fine for quite a few emulators. AMD had a massive single threaded performance deficit to overcome and really only got to a reasonable level with their latest offering. (To be fair native computer games are nowhere near as CPU heavy as emulators [there are some exceptions] are so for [most] native computer games AMD CPUs were a decent value..... just not for emulation)