Forget the next gen. For two reasons really: The next gen won't be that big an improvement over the current one, and 2. The next gen won't be coming anytime soon.
I'm pretty sure Crysis was only invented to get people to upgrade their hardware. Every other game on the market runs amazingly well... in DX10 no less... with the standard hardware available.
The G100 (or what NV actually calls it's next gen GPU) will be roughly 30-40% faster that the current
top end at release at the time (which should be the 9800GX2). That is the standard formula for both
ATI and NV. OC'ing can widen that delta. NV's next gen release timing will be driven by what ATI does
and I doubt you will see it before the middle to end of Q2 in 2008. If ATI looks like it can get a card into
the ball game with a card that can challenge NV earlier then the release will move up.
The 9800GX2 (2X G92's PCB's) is not next gen. It is a faster replacement for the now out of production
Ultra. It is a gap filler at the high end before the true next gens are released and to compete with ATI's
up coming dual GPU cards.
Games like Crysis drive the GFX card hardware market just like DOOM3 did 2 or 3 years ago. As game
maps, textures and shading become richer and more detailed the GPU horsepower needed to run them
at their top IQ levels at high resolution goes up. That is just the natural progression of games. They all
have a means to reduce games detail/IQ /Eye Candy for lower end or even the currently available top
end cards at release time.
Remember a game that is released today started developement 3-4 years ago. In order to lock in the
core code the game makers have to guess well in advance of a game final release as to the state of
what GFX card horsepower will be available when the game is actually released to the mass market.
Their is always a margin of error when ya have to use Crystal balls to take an educated guess of the
future. From the game makers point of view it is always better to to miss high and be able to reduce
a game graphics details/IQ/Eye Candy when/where needed than to miss low and have your game look
"Blah"/oh hum even when all in game GFX settings and eye candy are maxed out.
Viper