I'm not taking shots at the GTX 280 here, I know it will be a lot better than 8800 GTX. I was just suprised by how slowly current tech actually runs Crysis more than anything else.
It will be better, but I doubt it will be double the speed, never mind three times.
Just look at raw stats vs a 9800GTX.
Depending on the efficiency of the new shader archetecture it could easily blow away the current G92 cards, but not by massive amounts.
For example according to leaked specs the GTX 280 shader clock is ~1296Mhz with 240 shaders.
My overclocked 9800GTX runs 2000Mhz with 128 shaders.
Assuming the GTX 280 uses shaders (stream processors) that can do 1 MADD (2 FLOPS) and 1 MUL (1 FLOP) / clock same as the G92, we get:
GTX 280 = (MADD (2 FLOPs) + MUL (1 FLOP)) x 1296,000,000 x 240 = 933.12 GigaFLOPS (peak)
9800GTX OC = 3 x 2000,000,000 x 128 = 768 GigaFLOPS (peak)
9800GTX Stock = 3 x 1688,000,000 x 128 = 648.192 GigaFLOPS (peak)
Which makes the stock GTX 280 ~21% faster than an overclocked 9800GTX, and 44% faster than a stock 9800GTX :|
Nothing to be sniffed at! But no where near 2x the performance, let alone 3x.
Of course that is raw stats, and not taking into consideration the effect the faster mem bus and any shader optimisations nVidia might have done, but even with those I can't see the card being better than 2 x the performance of a current 9800GTX max.