... are broad brush upgrades. What staggers me is the wide variation that you can see amongst cards witht he same GPU from different vendors, especially when you are dealing with ones that are pre-overclocked.
Purchase timeframe comes into the picture but that's more a total cost of ownership issue rather than a performance one. Whether you bought say a 3870 now or when it was released, the FPS you get out of it now is the same (assuming you've updated the drivers).
You're right that it is hard to separate the 9800GX2 and the GTX280 - it depends on the game. For Crysis, the GTX280 is best overall, for CoD4 then it's the 9800GX2.
It's also true that the 4870 will beat the GTX 280 in some games, but overall the GTX 280 is the winner there. The 4870 X2 will be different, but that X2 bothers me in that I don't like the fact that some games took way too much of a performance hit under the 3870 X2 (I know, I own several).
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