ETW only runs on medium settings

Didn't have the time yet to play for real but did one battle and had a look at the campaign map. The later looks nice, I hope it is indeed an imporvement over the previous campaign maps.

The one thing which bothers me is the fact I can only run the game on medium detail. My machine perhaps can handle it (MTW2 was always at the max) but everything above medium is just grayed out. So, no nice effects and the battles look like :daisy: altough there is no lag at all.
Is there perhaps an option to get the battles look a bit nicer? I am sattisfied if it looks as good as MTW2 did but how....is there a way to increase the detail even though ETW doesn't reccomend it?

My current vidcard is a 7600GT which is obviously old and I want to replace it by a Radeon HD4870 1GB. Will that enable me to run ETW on the highest settings?