Rumored for a while now, the next big ATI release looks like it is now just right around the corner.
The 2-in-1 HD 3870X2 has been reviewed by some Chinese tech sites. Apparently the NDA was supposed to expire tomorrow, but has been pushed back by one week, so that ATI can work on the drivers a bit more. Now reports say that the NDA is set to expire on the 28th, for the HD 3870X2, and 3650/3450 cards.
If the early numbers are accurate, the HD 3870X2 is sometimes faster than NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra, but it depends on the game. The HD 3870X2 has a suggested retail price in the $449 to $499 range (USD), but you can expect that early prices for the new video card will be higher.
You can read an early review of the HD3870X2 right over here -- but there is a catch. The article is in Chinese.
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The nice benefit of course at higher resolutions is the detail level and how crisp things get, although if you're playing online I think most COD players just think about where the other team is coming out of and if there's someone camping up in the brush around the corner.
Although with 3 apparently in some level of development we can always have hope they'll address it.
Bad company is a more isolated project, BF3 the actual successor is on the way though from DICE. Next-gen performance they say, so hopefully they give it to PC and consoles.
The thing with the snipers, Yeah, I can understand that. When I was at the high point of my Game on BF2, I was scoring headshots against choppers, and their pilots. Of course, in single player, that isn't that great an accomplishment.
If you check through the benchmarks on that site (not sure if you have) you might get why I kinda wonder about the upgrade situation, the idea is that 2 chips on one board should be really amazing, but instead it's not doing anything really hugely imrpessive.
The fun part for you though is that when they do bring more upgrades around you could always grab the 3850 AGP and have next gen ownage for a small investment since progression of technology should technically reduce the cards to $120 or lower within a year.
Also, the only reason I ever was able to take down a Chopper with the M95 in single player was cause I modded the gun kits.
I guess the PS3 will either be running a highly optimized version of the game without normal mapping or they're just going to axe the texture and model quality to get it on there somehow. Even then the RAM consumption on the game is insane at times.
I had the figures at one point for high around 720p being around 410MB in VRAM and the game itself occupying around 930MB in system memory. It would be interesting to see how Crytek documents their port. The raw memory consumption is why they said consoles were unable to properly run the game.