Texture Resolution =/= Output Resolution.
We have had 4k textures on PC even during the 7th console gen.

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with you that it is lazy.
But a true Souls fanatic will eat it up regardless of how it looks.

In terms of how components generally affect video game performance... It is generally... Graphics Card > Central Processing Unit > System RAM Speed+capacity > Mass Storage.

Up to a point.
You can't just whack a Geforce 1080Ti into an Intel Atom system and expect to play the latest and greatest games.

In short though, if you have any decent quad-core processor clocked at 3ghz or more that was made in the last 10~ or so years, then chances are you could play the majority of the latest games with a decent GPU.

If you want a GPU that doesn't break the bank though... I wouldn't go any lower than a Geforce 1030/Radeon 550 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, those cards are pretty potent at 720P... And with lighter games (I.E. Overwatch) being playable at 1080P.

If you want us to give you better advice though... We will need to know your hardware specifications to better guide you to the right hardware.

In modern PCs, and consoles the GPU is king.
However the current gen consoles (the base units anyway) are very weak.
Even the low end PC GPUs will get the job done, assuming they are modern.

How much are you looking to spend?
What games are you looking to play?

A RX 560 - 1050 - 1050Ti would be around the PS4 -XOne range.
A 1060 6GB would roughly equal a PS4 Pro.
A 1070 is about a XxX in output.

You can always drop settings, resolution and / or cap yourself at 30FPS if needed.

That card is fine for Total War and Civilization. It's around the Xbox One in terms of capabilities.

I should reinforce that when I meant a 3Ghz CPU, I meant for an old CPU like a Core 2 Quad... So something like an old Sandy Bridge chip could operate at a much lower speed and have equivalent performance.

Feel free to post later with your complete hardware specs. :)

Don't go for low budget cards. Value for performance on paper its okay, but its false economy unless you like playing JUST really old games in low resolution.

Nvidia GTX1050 2GB or AMD RX560 would be a good place to start if you're on a tight budget. An extra £30-40 is well worth it unless you like playing games like they're slideshows.

So, I just ordered some PC games from eBay My PC collection has grown substantially this year alone!

What did you order?

I got a lot with these games:

1. The Amazing Spider-Man & Captain America: Dr. Doom's Revenge

2. Ballistics

3. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday

4. Carmageddon

5. Castles

6. Circle of Blood

7. Command & Conquer: Generals

8. Command & Conquer: Generals - Zero Hour

9. Conquests of Camelot

10. Diablo

11. Diablo II

12. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

13. Duke!ZONE for Duke Nukem 3D

14. Legends of Might & Magic

15. Mage Knight: Apocalypse

16. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

17. MechWarrior 3

18. Myst: Masterpiece Edition

19. Myst III: Exile

20. NHL 96

21. Nox

22. "Nuke It"

23. The Orange Box

24. ParaWorld

25. Phantasmagoria

26. Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure

27. Railroad Tycoon II

28. Red Storm Rising

29. Revolution X

30. Sanity: Aiken's Artifact

31. Serious Sam: The First Encounter

32. Shivers

33. Sin

34. Star Trek Conquest Online

35. The Tank Platoon

36. Tribes 2

Really depends on the rest of the rig. - If you have something that is already fairly old, it doesn't make sense to spend more money than you need to for future proofing.
Low-end cards these days are better equipped than old cards of old thanks to the improved memory systems (GDDR5) anyway.

The Windows Meltdown patch might have made my framerate issues in RL worse. I wish I could figure out what really is the cause of the issues in the first place. It's not that the CPU cannot handle 144fps, it's that I have short frame dips < 1s seemingly as soon as my CPU dares to do something other than RL in parallel.

I say CPU but it could really be anything. For example sometimes the game is extremely choppy at the first 10 seconds of a match and then smooths out, which points to a storage/memory issue but the game is running on a pretty fast SSD and there is plenty of fast RAM.

Everything points to things that interrupt the CPU or make it wait for too long since the drops also happen if I lock the game to 60fps. Everything is made worse when I start a browser, or even worse, watch a video on it. It could also be sync issues with multiple monitors of differing refresh rates but I kinda doubt that. The symptoms would have to be more regular for that.

At this point I need some debugger or analyzer that monitors the performance of all PC components and notifies me when there is a bottleneck somewhere that stops my CPU.

Nice.

It would be wonderful to get a good C&C title some day.
But yeah, EA.