Yeah, I was literally talking about just games, that is the only place where I need power!

AAAA console games won't be 1080p 60fps tho...
They will likely be 720p and 30fps and look like Samaritan, Elemental and the Agni's Philosophy demo's.

how is it that PS360 can do the graphics were seeing today with 7 year old tech? PS3's graphics card is comparable to nvidia 7800 series, yet it still manages to push out the graphics we see today?

Gears of War was released on PC a year later - and could have been released along side the 360 version had Microsoft and Epic games no wanted to use it as an exclusive to push units and sell hardware (the game inidentally looks a hell of a lot better taking advantage of the higher resolution, better anti aliasing and better texture filtering, The same is also true for Fable (which again released a year later to give the 360 more exclusives), so your point on both games is rather moot - since the pc version of both is superior.

Again you're still saying compare a 2006 game (gears) to a 2004 pc game, As a developer i can tell you that if you compare software of different generations there will always be a jump in graphical quality.

PlayStation 3 only has 256mb of vram but that's only a limitation if you're using only the RSX for video processing - you forget (conveniently), that the system also has another 256mb of ram and a CellBBE processor which was initialy designed to process graphics as well - and does so in many later generation PlayStation 3 games, giving the engine 400-500mb of ram for graphics processing which is very similar to the Xbox360, since both systems reserve some memory for other functions and feaures.

So comparing it to a 2006 pc with a 512mb card is most suitable since the PC card also loses ram to driver and system overheads. - Taking those overheads into account grab yourself a 7950GX2 and run Battlefield 3 at 1280x704 (same as console versions) on medium settings for everything (same as console versions) and you'll find it runs it just as well as the consoles do.

IQ is hardware capability related but also tied to experience with new technologies - not a single game you have pointed to was a launch title for a console, and yet you say "compare it to a 2004 game", (a year before even the xbox released), compare any of the screenshots i posted (barring the fc3 one since im on a phone and searching for fa cry 1 for some reason showed that), and you'll see graphics comparable to console launch titles - compare games of the same year to console counterparts and theyre just as good, but with the benefit of anti aliasing, higher framerates and higher resolutions.

Ultimately, the hardware is new to console developers, but it's not capable of anything that isn't already possible on PC's, the image quality jump will only happen once developers push the hardware - by which time the same image quality jump will be present on PC's - and in many cases the jumps already there, developers just need to cut it down and make it fit with consoles - UE4 is a perfect example of this.

I don't doubt that eventually, 720 and ps4 games will look much better than current pc titles do (even on high end pc's of today), but that isnt going to be at launch - it'll be a 10 months to few years later, by which time newer pc software will look just as good, again benefitting from the additional 'polish'offered by hardware with more grunt.

But hey, i only spent the past 3 months working with the "orbis" devkit on a title for my now ex employer, so what would i know about the graphical quality of launch titles.

Mostly true, but......once (if) publishers figure out how to battle piracy on PCs better, I'm expecting to see again devs that are PC only, and that are pushing the limits, as once devs of old ays did.

For example, some of us slightly older folks rember days of first Commanche back in 92, when completely new tech was introduced - it gave for the first time flight simulators much more detailed terrains than usual vector graphics. And I vividly remember people getting PCs just for that.........as I said, if publishers find a way to combat piracy on PCs and lower it to accpetable levels, we might start seeing return of true PC games, not dependant of console cycles.

As i keep saying - because they have had 7 years with the EXACT SAME HARDWARE - giving them plenty of time to push it as far as it can go, so compare the software yar-for-year if you're talking about image quality, if developers were forced to make engines for PC games work at peak performance on older hardware, then texture resolution would be limited and full screen visual effects would suffer - much like they do on consoles - they instead opt to make the game run on the latest hardware where limitations arent an issue, and depend on the video quality settings to allow older hardware to run it.

Console game engines are written specifically for the hardware, PC game engines are written for OGL/DX API's which themselves have overheads, running on drivers that have overheads, which sit on an OS that is also an overhead - and yet still pump out much better visual quality.

And heres the thing, PS4/720 are running on virtually pc-arch formats, using the same video api's, (abeit, sans driver, since it has direct access), so the end result (and console gamers dont seem to see this), is higher quality games for consoles, and the quality gap between console and pc jumping more - since PC games won't need to be gimped during development to make it easier for them to work on the console versions - If anything the PC may well become the lead platform for multi-platform titles because its easier to port a pc title to the new consoles than it was with the ps3/360, due to the significantly different archs.

End result - PC games look even better than they do now - and better than the new console software.

And this is when I stopped reading. Because I am not. And neither do I nor does anyone else needs to be. The number of that market is insignificant anyway.

Consoles are optimised, every last register in their momery bands and every single pipeline is being taken properly advantage of and their performance is always maximized.  PC gaming is a bottomless pit that alwasy needs to be mended with more power.

There is a logical falacy when comparing PCs to consoles because you are always comparing the occasional optimum PC rig for every game and a console which is a given setup of hardware. It's like comparing a variable to a constant.

I agree that launch games from the PS4/nextbox won't blow away the people with high end PC when it comes to graphics as they are used to play at least at 1080p@60fps with all kind of extras like AA, but using that to say that those consoles won't be next gen...

B-b-b-u-t... the PS4 specs. As a wise and trustworthy poster said, they will be x10 of the WiiU's. More than enough to justify it against a PC.

It all makes financial sense.