What a trick...
No wonder AMD/ATI can't play Crysis well
This was fixed a long time ago, so no it has nothing to do with the reason that ATI cards don't handle Crysis as well as Nvidia cards. There are other reasons for that...
you can always buy a 96 and then buy another one when they get even cheaper, run SLI and you have one hell of a setup. 2x 96 in SLI will beat any single gpu card out there and hold its own against better cards in SLI at a lower price. I was going to buy 8800gt SLI but after seeing the benchmarks have decided to save another 50.00 and get the 9600GT in SLI. They will get me by just fine until the next generation comes a long.
From strictly a "future proof" standpoint, I'd have to say the 3870. Seen instances of Assassins creed getting a 20% performance boost in DX 10.1 mode.