Get your $30 back from the NVIDIA settlement first. Then dream about NVIDIA lowering their prices later.

Unless you're running at 144hz then a 1060 or 480 are fine for 1080p.

AMDs new RX 480 is worth checking out, especially if you play in 1920 x 1080 resolution. It costs roughly 200 -250 depending whether you go for the 4GB or 8GB model.
If that is too expensive the RX 470 is due out soon and should be good enough for most games at that resolution.

Well that is reassuring since I can confirm its GPU temp.

And I disabled the auto shutdown if GPU gets too overheated, I will just stop playing the game after awhile.

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AMD Announces Radeon RX 470 & RX 460 Specifications, Shipping in Early August

2 years

The 970 still has some longevity, I originally purchased mine to handle Longest Journey 2 and ultimately The Witcher 3 after it was announced. I think I paid $341.99 for mine in May 2015, looking at the same card now, it is $279.99, roughly $60 less a year later.

It played The Witcher 3 quite well and is fairly adequate for playing today's VR games too, even with a slight adjustment to the super-sampling for clarity.

Unless you are a philanthropist and prefer to be frugal, don't purchase "founder edition" cards, they are just stock implementations and there are usually tweaked cards put out by 3rd party hardware vendors at a lower cost (of course nVidia doesn't want to compete with them, which is why they are priced much higher).

I think my my next card (but I'll be saving my pennies for the next several months) is going to be a GTX 1080, however, I don't expect it to go down in price very much (hopefully I can catch a good one on sale), but I do want it to be able to keep up with the emerging VR titles, as I think it will be important when the AAA titles start hitting the medium.

As for the new cards dropping in price - whenever the next gen comes out

I managed to pick up a brand new 2nd 980 TI for <$550AUD (RRP was ~$1100 at the time - now around $800ish) a couple of weeks ago - the 980 TI in SLI tends to beat 1 1080 in SLI supported games - for quite a bit cheaper

And I'll still be rocking out decent FPS for a while yet in any respect

That's sounds like a cheap price. I don't mind paying more since I don't update very frequently. I've been using a radeon HD 5700 for 5 years or so.

I just upgraded my old GTX 760 to a GTX 1060. If the 3 year old 760 didn't die on me and I didn't want to risk food poisoning roasting the card in the oven, I wouldn't have gotten the 1060 and waited another year or two before upgrading. The 760 is still fine for my gaming needs.

I've been finding 1280x720 to be more than sufficient 90% of the time. Maybe my rig is clearly in the lower end of the mid-powered gaming machine, or maybe I've just not been blown away with HD like everyone else.

I'm looking at the 1060 myself. 250 for what you get is just too good to pass up, and more importantly, I won't have to upgrade my PSU if I went for the 1080.
I would honestly say the 1060 is a better bargain. For the same price as the 8 gig 480, you get more power at competitive power consumption.

This is a nice little comparison article from Tom's showing relative prices, basic specs and grouping them into display preference categories for review of recent GPU's

Good to hear it. I would recommend to use an program that reads your GPU's temperatures when you play a game that is more demanding, like GPU-Z or other program for your GPU. I would also recommend if your warranty is over to clean your old thermal and put some new thermal paste on your GPU and CPU. If you do not know how, I would either say to get someone who knows, or watch some videos and learn by yourself.

I'm buying a RX 470 for this purpose. I believe it releases in two days :)