Ha! You’d have to be clairvoyant to know that. It is assumed that performance should match SB, although AMD claims better. It will only really be known when they arrive. Pricing will then depend on how they perform in relation to Intel’s offerings, although should be a bit keener.
I have no issues running CoD currently, with everything on ‘medium’, except Model, Effects and Terrain which I have on ‘high’ (shadows on, grass off) at 1920 x 1080. RoF I run at max. I also don’t OC my cpu, as it really makes very little difference – a couple of fps average in Black Death when raising it to 4.0Ghz. I’m not aware of any AMD cpu user having any particular hassle with CoD, other than what everyone else has, that is.
THG did a test with an i5 750 running at default speed and 4.0GHz, and there was a negligible difference in the frame rates over a number of games. Clocking your cpu will only produce a meaningful increase if it’s a bit too slow to start with, and even then the gain will not be great. There are certain routines that benefit when increasing your cpu speed, but games generally do not.
There is also no issue with running a nVidia gfx card in an AMD board; in fact THG did test each in each other’s boards at some stage, and surprisingly the GeForce was a bit quicker in the Ati board, than both the Ati card in the nVidia board, and the nVidia card in their board