Last upgrade I did everyone told me to go ATi because they were the best power/cost.
They are, but their drivers have given me grief for too many things over the last year.

Personal experience only, but it's put me off buying another ATI card for a long while.

What driver problems? I've had like the last ten cards ati and never had a problem. Having said that, in my humble opinion nvidia has the best bang for buck at this current nano second of time and if I could be bothered upgrading that's where I would be looking.

http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=247&bid=2&sid=74161

it is a tad (like $10) over budget, but it will run battlefied well, and do the really high res's, all stable, cool, and very low noise

I know it isn't ati, but the support is better, and there is more room to overclock this card due to its good cooling

Wrong.

Best bang for Buck cards ATM are:

Ati 7850 - $250
Ati 7870 - $360
Ati 7970 - $520
Nvidia 680 - $600+ depending on availability

This should change when the other nvidia 600 series come.out like the 660..670

based on what?????, you might need a graph, pie chart, or something to back those claims there, or is this like a AMD is better than an i5 because it has eight core sort of thing?

I have a GTX560 and a GTX580 and they are both great cards.

Recommend you spend a bit of time with your price list in one hand and these charts to work out the best deal: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards,1.html

Gigabyte GTX 570 signing in, great card and runs everything perfectly.

Based on whirlpool wiki plus a 1000 other charts and graphs that you can google if you like

Here is the 7850 vs the 560ti.Both in OP's price range @ $250

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/549?vs=547

7850 comes ahead in almost all games. Thus best bang for buck ATM. I think this will change very soon though when we see the 660 and 670

while it shows that the stock cards at release, the card i recommended isn't a stock card, and makes up for what the stock card lacks, (like 2 gb ram)

and while I think your right regarding the field changing come the mid-low level gtx 600's, there is alot of bang still left in the 500's, friends have bought the card i recommended, and have run BF3 at high res with no issues and it comes in near enough to budget, it is tried and tested and while it might not have 22nm chipsets it handles all the OP asked for and more,

also, using those charts, bf3 is better on a 560, pretty sure a card with the same ram as the 7850 (oh, like the card i linked to) would show a better result, and would best the 7850 in far more tests