I wish I could get excited about this...but those benchmarks are really low. 1024x768 at lowest setting. I get that its in integrated chip which makes it impressive. It is like having a 1.6 liter hybrid car that has 200 horsepower and has really good fuel economy...but I really don't mind spending and paying for 4X more on fuel to have 400 horsepower.

Also Slimebeast... Metro 2033 maxed out, on DX 11 at 1080p, with Physx on and 3D vision on, at 60 fps... Next gen consoles will be VERY lucky to come close to that level of performance.

You need a GTX480 SLI and I7 to achieve this today...which is 2000 dollars worth of gear.

The biggest factors in that costing are various inefficiencies.

• According to Carmack you need 1/3rd the performance to run at 30FPS over 60FPS at the same image quality. Most consoles will be forced to run 3D content at 1280/720 @60FPS due to HDMI 1.4 limitations.
• PhysX itself is very inefficient. Wake me up when they even start to use the SIMD instructions on modern X86 processors.
• A large proportion of that cost is a beefy power supply, case, cooling fans of which a console needs none.
• A large proportion of the retail cost are the retail / component margins, especially in relation to higher end parts. For instance Nvidia takes >40% margins and the card maker takes >20% margins and the retailer takes >20% margins. Thats how your $50 GPU ends up costing $150 before other costs are factored in.
• Given the improvements in technology / software and the efficiency of a closed system. You pretty much double the effectiveness of any component installed in a console.

The next generation consoles don't need that level of performance to exceed that level of image quality.

In any case, IMO probably the worst thing which happened for PC-gaming was the allowance of cards to draw > 150W of power. It would have probably been better had GPUs themselves been limited to the 75W PCI-E limit for the overall PC-gaming market, not the whims of the high end enthusiasts.

Check out Crysis Real Lifesis mod in HD.

If the next gen looks like that mod, that totally  butt rapes Metro 2033 by the way, I'd be disappointed.

Really?

This a little far fetched comment but, nowadays we have games on the HD consoles, specially on PS3, looking almost like that. For instance I can mention Uncharted 2, don't know about others because I haven't seen too much though.

I really hope next gen consoles can surpass that and "break" the real life barrier, fooling us with footage that is hard to distinguish from real life.

I don't know about Nintendo because they will come up with something totally fucked up that will put the world running in circles and it is not the graphics, but I bet that Sony or Microsoft (maybe Microsoft) are going to bet on a  powerhouse system and I hope that system can bring joy and tears to my face.It is my dream to be playing something that I can hardly distinguish from real life footage.

The next generation consoles will tend to break your appreciation for the older titles graphically as a whole. So whilst games like Uncharted 2 have been massaged to near perfection in terms of art direction and performance, your standards will be completely different when you're comparing games which have actual geometry over mere textures impersonating as such, especially when you're using a 3D interface. If you compare the special effects from the 80s, 90s and 2000s to something like Avatar for instance, you'll see right through a lot of the older special effects and they would stand out like a sore thumb relative to some of the newer effects. Its the same with games, only on a much shorter time-scale.

You just can't see the smoke and mirrors until you've witnessed a better show. Thats the reason why many of the PC gamers and PS3 gamers have differing opinions on the worth of many of these titles. The PS3 gamers haven't seen better. Its not that the PC gamers are dicks, its just that the PS3 gamers haven't experienced the same games.

Tessellation, lighting,  and 3D are the three major areas for improvement.

Tessellation will bring massive improvements in the overall scene complexity. No longer will you be limited to flat textures and simple geometries.

Lighting is the main difference between a realistic looking scene and an unrealistic looking scene at the moment. All you have to do is check out some of the ray-traced examples out there.

3D is something which is fledgeling at the moment, much like online was in the last generation. In the next generation it will be fully realised on >50% of all software released. It represents a very important and growing niche market and possibly the next best way to increase immersion in the game world.

What do you mean by HDMI limitation ? We can run any PC monitor through HDMI 1.3 in 1920x1080p@60fps currently.

And I don't agree about high power GPUs. If we were limited to 75W we would be at level of radeon 5750 which is low end of today cards. Now 150W ceiling is more resonable as that is 5850/GTX460 which provides good performance but if people are willing to pay for 200W monsters why should anyone stop them. I have GTX470 and i don't find any problems with it - altrough of course such card is enthusiast level gear and requirers computer case with above average wentilation.

You can't run 3D at more than 1280 by 720 due to how the HDMI 1.4 spec operates. Its not a bandwidth limitation.

The reason why they should have limited GPU power?

1. It means that instead of simply tacking on more functional units they would have been forced to make them a lot more efficient and this would translate to improved performance from bottom to top.

2. It means that PC game developers would be able to target a more consistant specification and there wouldn't be as great a spread between the highest end and the lowest end GPU on the market.

That's for 3D. Normal picture can go to 1080p without problems.

Ad1. And they are working on power efficiency - radeon 5770 brings power similar to 4870 at 100W instead of 180, radeon 5870 has performance equal to pair of 4870 in 186W TDP instead of 360Watts.

Ad2. I'd rather prefer if they reduced this gap by increasing performance of low end cards instead of putting leash on development of high end ;) And actually next generation of cpus is doing exactly this. By greatly increasing power of integrated GPUs they give stable base for delevepor to benchmark against and also this will make tons of low end cards pointless which mean GPU manufacturers will have to impove low end gpus to the point when they bring serious performance.

Zlejedi your standards are way too high, a HD 5750 is definitely not in the lower end of modern cards. The low end are cards costing $50 or even less.

But the basic issue with decent level performance with the integrated on chip video of Sandy Bridge doesn't change: it still requires consumers to buy a new computer in most instances, or change CPUs/motherboards in all others.

Naturally, nobody is going to buy a new mobo and CPU for the integrated video solution, so the focus is on the typical consumer that buys pre-made PCs like most normal people.

Better integrated video shouldn't do much more than drop the floor from under the future entry level VGA card market.

This doesn't matter significantly to developers either since the only integrated video that will run GPU intensive games at the lower end would have to be PCs that were recently purchased. They still have to account for the 99% of the non-enthusiast PCs that predate Sandy Bridge in determining where they can draw the line as to what hardware can play their games at acceptable perfomance levels.

This won't force GPU manufacturers ATI and Nvidia into producing better low end GPU cards; they'd simply stop selling them and position their next tier of cards as entry level while marketing the performance advantages of discrete video cards.

But the advantages of decent integrated video performance doesn't change either. Consumers (regular, not enthusiasts) should have to play less of the "can this computer play these titles" guessing game without having to resort to shopping for a discrete VGA card when purchasing a new computer based upon Sandy Bridge CPUs.