To answer your question about recording, recent NVidia cards have a feature called ShadowPlay that can record games using a chip in the card independently of the CPU and the rest of the GPU, meaning next to no performance impact on games and computer usage. ShadowPlay is capable of both recording and streaming in 1080P at 60 FPS.
The limiting factor for recording on a 970 is more likely to be your HDD or SSD. It's strongly recommended to record to a second HDD, apart from the disk where Windows and the game is installed, to avoid the disk from being overloaded.
However, in response to whether the 970 is good enough; the GTX 1060 will be released soon (sources say the 14th of July) which will most likely offer performance improvements over the 970. I strongly recommend waiting until then before making a decision and buying the 970.
As to whether the 970 is powerful enough to run the latest games at ultra settings, that's a matter of the game. Games like The Witcher 3 are very graphically intensive and can't be run with high FPS on the 970.
Without knowing the specific games you're interested in playing, it's best to look up user experiences for the card and game you're interested in.
Edit: This article says the GTX 1060 will rival the performance of a 980, so again, I strongly recommend waiting.