Maybe I reminiscence too much. Times have change. I can recall a time when a gaming console wasn't supposed to be powerful. Didn't have to be powerful. We were just amazed with what we had and what kind of magic they could pull off. The arcades were like being able to play games from the future. PCs were some sort of mythical gaming creature with abilities we console gamers didn't even dream of.

Now, we (myself included) are so picky. So hard to please. We want the highest performance possible and a billion capabilities at the lowest possible cost. Where did it all go so wrong? Yes, the leap isn't that great. Yes, we still want to be wowed. But then when did that ever become the focus?

I reflect on the past quite often. The NES. The SNES. Gameboy. Playstation. Wii. PS2. It was never about power or performance. It was about the fun that we had. Before this gen, the most powerful never won. It was innovation, creativity, and gameplay that won the day.

*shrugs*

I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO GET OFF'A MY LAWN!!

Ha, it was the other way around. I was stuck with my dad's 386 while my friends had NES and C64, 16 color EGA with bleeps vs fluent graphics with full sound.
Then they had already upgraded to MSX 2 and Amiga 500 while we're just getting a 486 with VGA, still bleeps but at least 256 colors in 320x200! I had Civilization and Dune 2 though :) And being an awful pirate in those days I had as many games to play as I could buy empty floppies :/

Consoles started falling behind when PCs got GPUs. Before that math coprocessors were all the rage. Ofcourse the price difference was still enormous. My first gaming pc in '94, a Pentium 90 mhz with 8mb ram, Soundblaster and Diamond Viper gpu was $3000 dollars.

The fun was all the same though. Everything was still new and new genres were popping up left and right. We were too busy having fun with all our pirated games to care about which had more colors or better frame rates. Not hampered by nostalgia and comparing games to everything that came before them :) No massive hype either as all the gaming news I got was a couple pages in some PC magazine. Games just showed up.

NOW TURN OFF THE INTERNET AND GO PLAY A GAME!

Errr, no. It wasn't the case last gen "because the totally different architecture of the systems".

It happened... every... single... generation.

Why would the current gen be an exception? People are, again, blowing shit out of proportion. 

Not my point.  All of the previous generations had completely custom processors unique to the particular system.  The current gen are using mostly off the shelf cpus and gpus.  This results in easier to program for setups.  Has there ever been a generation where the cpus/gpus were based on the same x86 architecture as the PC?  The fundamental design of these processors and cpus are nothing new.  Why do think so many apps are being ported to the XB1 and PS4 so fast?  If the systems are not designed using console specefic cpus/gpu's, why is it going to take 3 years for developers to "figure them out"?

Previous generations didn't have so many developers working on developing for the systems either.  There are hundreds/thousands of indie developers working on games before the systems even being launched.  Development is much more advanced this time around.

no becuz there was a animal crosing this gen and it has me in it so iz gud gen

It's not about figuring them out. It's about developing tools and engine features that properly harness the power of each individual consoles. Those evolve over time. Those are not appearing out of nowhere just because the architecture is similar to what has been in use for years.  The fact that the consoles are closed architecture means that the devs have to go the extra mile to suck as much as possible from the consoles. Something they don't need to do on the PC and where optimization is near impossible due to the countless possible PC configuration. Instead, games are asked to use hardware that are far over the actual requirements due to poor/no optimization. Also, GPGPU is still new. And the devs will learn to tackle it over time, as tools will be made to harness that aspect of the console more efficiently. Among plenty other factors that will change, evolve and improve throughout the generation.

I'm pretty sure audio isn't the only game data that doesn't need high speed memory access though.

And the bumpmapping in Rogue was of sufficient quality to add a great deal of detail and (for the time) realism to its visuals:

I don't think the water in the second picture has bump mapping, it appears to be just waves baked in to the texture after having inspecting closer to it. Texture's can also achieve the same effect as bump mapping too because after all both techniques are meant to simulate geometry. "Sufficient" is a bit much when the effect was absent or extremely sparse for a lot of surfaces  ...

The quality of the bump mapping effect is pretty iffy. When it works though the surfaces do look better but it's selectively applied to much closer areas of the camera and sometimes the low resolution normal maps can cause pixelation artifacts too so in some cases the bump mapping in Rogue Squadron can ruin the artwork ... 

The water isn't a baked texture; I have the game and you can fly right down to see the EMBM shading used to simulate undulation.

Gamecube is a 6th gen console, of course to our modern eyes it looks low resolution and pixelated. But PS2 was even more so.

I got a PS4, I got no complaints.