Originally Posted by thestand
We're at a point in technology, and not just video game graphics, where it's not about improving, it's about fundamentally changing. There was just an article today about Lithium Ion batteries, and how they had a major breakthrough where, if you make the sheets of metal porous, it allows efficiency of about 10x what batteries are today, and after 1 year of regular usage, they're still 5x as efficient as an off-the-shelf Li-ion battery today.
How does that relate to gaming? Well, for graphics, yes, GPUs will continue to get faster. But, as an article someone posted stated, what if the bulk of the work was done in the cloud, leaving your onboard GPU just to do AA, and what the extra cores on a top of the line discrete PC graphics card do right now? Also, memory will play a big part. If these ship with SSDs that have a blurringly fast read/write time, paired with an optic device like the next generation of Blu-Ray that Sony has hinted at, which will be able to fit 6TBs onto an optical disc, you could have textures for daaaaaays, all being handled in an innovative way.
And there was a big hubbub earlier this year about a new graphics system that generates spheres instead of polygons, where a character would have billions of these spheres, instead of a few polygons. No longer would a rock just be a little physics particle with three polygons laid across it, it would be a mound of billions of little particles. At the moment, the tech is unrealistic, because it's hitting a natural bottleneck, because while it fundamentally works, no CPU/GPU pair in existence can render trillions of individual units on the fly in motion. It struggles to generate them while they're still. But if the tech can find a way to come down to, say, thousands or millions of particles, and the CPU/GPU/cloud computing combined can lower the bottleneck, it may be feasible. Not on this generation though, I'm talking a decade down the line.
TLDR version: lots of new possibilities. Every generation is believed to be the best, and then it's decimated by the next.
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