Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.