That's not how it ACTUALLY worked. How it actually worked is that top video card manufactures would make multi-million dollar bids to to the devs of the three or four AAA games that were predicted to be best-sellers in order to get the devs to optimize their rendering for whatever this year's top video adapter was going to be. And nobody really cared if it didn't run on your crappy old last-year's card, because everybody undrerstood that the vast majority of games revenue comes from people who have just bought expensive new systems. (Inside experience, I lived it).

I don't think it has ever been the case that this year's AAA games play well on last year's video cards.