Apologies for the ridiculous title of this thread, I don't know what else to call it. Just curious if a project like this has been done before, but now with the cost of top tier (for the era) video cards and other components generally through the roof, and unobtainable for many, I thought it would be helpful to have a cross reference sheet to identify lower tier cards (thus more cost effective) from a generation or two beyond the intended build era which would perform roughly the same, if that makes sense. Example, if somebody is building a "play anything from that era" 1999 system, then something like a TNT2 Ultra would be the card of choice, but, $$$$. So, maybe stick a GeForce4 440MX from 2002 in there instead, which are plentiful and dirt cheap (I don't know if that's a fair comparison based on performance, it's just an example).

Obviously this does not take into account specific features which might be lost in newer generation cards, such as table fog on cards newer than the FX 5000 series cards, or specialized APIs like Glide for which there is no substitute for a 3dfx card, and interface restrictions like needing a PCI card when the only newer generation cards are AGP or PCIe, etc.

Is there value in doing this? Or if it's already been done, please point me in that direction.