It still is a benchmark. The latest and greatest sims are getting pretty realistic but will still bring any machine I've seen to its knees with everything cranked up.
There probably were also a lot of sims that really went for the most realism possible.
However, after the era I referred to it was (is?) mostly FPS games that held this benchmark category (Unreal was the first title where my peers would buy dedicated or at least supporting graphics hardware for, like 3dfx voodoo) and soon after titles like Crysis were "the benchmark".