I hate to have to keep saying this, but it seems like a lot of people don't believe it's true: the race to improve graphics and horsepower is over. The Wii is "good enough" for the majority (read: those not on the hardcore fringe), and the 360 and PS3 have pushed graphics further than most care about. The only ones clamoring for more power and graphics are the particularly hauteur developers and the particularly discriminatory hardcore gamers.
Also, the processor speed cap was hit several years ago: just a little over 3GHz. Since then, boosts to speed have just been the old gimmick of adding more processors, which is prohibitively expensive (just look at what it did to boost the price of the Cell processor), or making processor use more efficient (a smarter move, and probably why AMD has been kicking Intel's butt since the speed cap was hit in PC processors).
Only poorly run companies opt to spend more when they can make more by spending less. Unless there's some massive breakthrough that obliterates the speed cap and makes multi-core processors unnecessary for speeds above 3GHz, we're not going to see another jump in processing power next generation. And unless the majority of consumers randomly decide that the likes of the HD consoles and Blu-Ray are worth the extra cash for an improvement in visual quality that most of them don't even notice, better graphics are not going to be the name of the game, either.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
