Honestly? I think current top gen cards have proportionally for more horsepower.
My friend paid around 400ish € for his 9800XT back in the day, we all called him crazy for that.
I got it's little sister card, the 9600XT for much less (probably around half that price?).
9600XT would be comparable to today's 1050: can play all titles, as long as you did not get the idea of cranking the resolution.
The 9800XT was probably on par with today's 1070: plenty of overkill horsepower at "standard" resolutions and can dabble in higher ones, albeit on a limited scale (wouldn't recommend the 1070 for 4k).
The "super Tier", which is basically MASSIVE overkill for 99% of all users (
steam puts 4K resolutions at a lolworthy 0.7%), beyond that just didn't exist back then, so I think it's a little unfair to compare them directly.
Yup prices have gone up, but not by 75%. Only thing that sucks this generation is that the ~300€ tier vanished. You could either go cheap with a 1060 /480(?) for around 220€ or had to jump all the way to 450+ to get a 1070.