To say the Unreal 3 engine will surpass it so quickly is so dumb... There is no release date for it yet and believe me it is going to be sometime before any kind of game will be released. I imagine you will not see it in any publically available form until at least another new range of GPU's have been released by leading manufacturers. The requirements of the engine dictate that the entry level hardware, not recommended specification, will need to be a Geforce FX 6800 Ultra board! Sad, but true. This means 2006 sometime...
Its a bit like when the Doom III code was run at QuakeCon 2003 or whenever it was... It ran on OCed Nvidia Geforce FX 5950 Ultras at 25fps!... and it was jittery as hell in some places. However when John Carmack announced the engine he said that the engine required at least a Ti4600 when in fact we know now that a 6800 Ultra / x800 is required as minimum for full graphical splendour...