> It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now.
Dumb as it sounds, it is because the client and the server are in lock-step. The root of the issue is the hardware on their servers. It doesn't have much to do with client hardware. The fixes for this are within the next few patches (maybe year and a half away). It has a lot to do with how much junk there is floating around on the server and, when you get a pristine server, things are much better.
It's still not acceptable, especially given that their promo videos demonstrate an experience that does not exist right now (unless you hit gold with a pristine server). However, it has absolutely nothing to do with client hardware. It's a bug.
It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now. Just look at the original Crysis. It's still not easy to get solid high frame rates on a decade-old game since it was designed with the assumption that CPUs would continue to evolve on the axis of fast, single threaded performance. Instead parallelism happened.
A good game engine should scale smoothly from mid-range hardware upwards, and be designed so that it can be modified to take advantage of advances in hardware when they become available, not before.