That tech demo was running on three GTX 580 cards. Next gen consoles will not have anywere close that much power.

Well according to Epic they will, and if you look at what they said the PS3 and 360's power would be equivalent to back before the specs on those two systems were even revealed they were pretty much exactly on.  Regardless of whether or not people are fans of their games, there is no doubt that Epic does know what they are talking about when it comes to hardware and graphics.  Now it might not be quite that powerful but probably pretty close.  I don't think we'll see new hardware from Sony or MS for At least 2 more years and by that time this level of technology will have dropped substantially in price.

It's not the price that is problem. It's heat and power usage. Even this gen MS (and to some extend Sony) had huge problems with heat and power usage of their consoles (remember RROD and YLOD) and today graphics cards put out even more heat than before and need a lot more power (one GTX 580 warms up to 85C in usage and uses 250W of power). There is not doubt that we will see nice graphical leap next gen as even one GTX 460 is billion time more powerfull than RSX or Xenos but the leap wont be as big as before.

So PS4 and xbox720 are not so far away after all. 2013 release for both?

You may be right, who knows still too early to tell, but just simply the fact that Epic able to generate this kind of graphics all in real time is damn impressive and exciting, the future of gaming will indeed be AWESOME.

I read in neogaf that they say that Epic believes they can get the same tech demo runing on a single GTX 580 if they optimized it.

This demo was probably run at a very high res, like 2560x1600 or even higher... consoles will probably use something like 1920x1080 or lower... so they'd need something less powerfull than a GTX 580 to run this... And next gen will probably arrive in 2012-first half of 2013 so there'll be better video cards with less power consumption by that time.

I'd say next gen consoles will use something between an HD 6870 and an HD 6950 and they'll be able to run this (at a lower res) with little heat and low power consumption.

very sexy, i approve.

No, it's going to be much more powerful than that.

Back in Nov 2005 Microsoft came out with with a console which had a GPU almost 80% as fast as Nvidias 7800GTX which was released only 5 months before it (in June the same year).

The 6950 is already 3 months old and not even the most powerful GPU out there, and next console gen is still far away.

I see... maybe you're right... I really hope they're more powerful than that but they'll need to bring power consumption and heat down a lot and use a nice cooling system because if they don't it could end worse than the RRoD. I just don't see that happening today... but it'll probably be different in 2 years.

I hope they use something more powerful than the GTX 580 and a 6 cores CPU/GPU hybrid :P... imagine that at just 300/400 dollars, it'd be like a dream for the consumers... let's just hope prices go down by the time they're released or companies will have to take huge losses again.

I think we'll start hearing rumours of next gen consoles next year... It'd be awesome if they showed new consoles at E3 2012 :P

Lol, Versus XIII will probably be released AFTER next gen starts xD

No they wont. These new high end cards simply use too much power and are too hot. Situation will not change in two years that much because process shrinks have slowed down a lot compared to past and there really isnt other viable solutions to reduce power usage that much. Even this gen MS had huge problems with heat and it costed them a lot of money (RROD). Not to mention that Nintendo showed how little graphics matter to customers in the end so I doubt that MS and Sony will enter in new graphics war again like they did this gen.