I am underwhelmed by my 4K TV and maybe X1X already has the GPU power for 9th gen.

[MajorMalfunction]

Machiavellian said:
I wonder if the difference seen makes a bigger difference if the assets are 4K. Which games actually use 4K assets and resolution. I would believe those games should show a much better difference in image quality.

It's simpler and more complicated. The simple part is that if you have 4K x 4K texture assets available (for every texture in the game), getting them on-screen requires a patch to add those files to the local filesystem, whether that be PS4 / XB1 or PC. No changes to levels / etc need to be made. The complicated part is that there are compromises needed to be made to run at 4K output without blowing HW budgets. Deferred rendering uses 3-5 (or 8 if you're Infamous Second Son, at a whopping 41 bytes / pixel) screen-sized render targets, often 4 bytes a piece, read multiple times per frame. Those get heavy quickly in terms of processing time and memory bandwidth. Blow your bandwidth budget, and you don't make frame time or have to compromise on anti-aliasing. IMO, anti-aliasing is the next frontier in console graphics. I've read about an alternative to deferred shading called the visibility buffer. It's deferred but designed for high resolution displays. It's 2 render targets (12 bytes total) and quite a bit smaller than most deferred pipelines (16-20+), storing triangle references but no triangle attributes (color / normal / specular / roughness / etc.). MGSV is 4 render targets including depth, but it has to compromise and try to cram normals into 8 bits / channel when you want 10 or 11. You get artifacts from that, that AA can't totally resolve. It sucks and the visibility buffer solution has none of those problems. Even better, you get MSAA compatibility for free. With 4K being a thing, I think (and hope) that the Visibility Buffer wins out next-gen. We'll get better visuals at a smaller performance cost. That leaves more room for anti aliasing and newer / better rendering techniques.

See this for the gritty details on the Visibility Buffer.

http://www.conffx.com/Visibility_Buffer_GDCE.pdf