You obvious underestimate the new cards. They CAN reach performance levels of 7800s. Give and take some driver/DX10 shortcuts, you get there with almost the same performance.

If they pull a f***ing Adobe and enforce use of SSE2/SSSE3 mandatorily/for performance... I'll kill Ken Levine. (Because they're too lazy to code.) Crysis is also *ahem ahem*, whoring Yorkfield. But that's a little more reasonable.
@Gold, My 1.83 Athlon XP is gonna suffer hell if they need SSE2. Virtua Tennis 3 and DiRT already need it, and I do NOT want to see Unreal Engine 3's newer builds and branches require it too.
Altivec FTW.