Right, they should just go and make Freespace 3 instead :P

Actually the original Xbox had 128 mbit chips whereas the Xbox 360 has 512 mbit chips. The increase in density in four years is only four fold which makes sense as transistors had roughly doubled every two years or thereabouts. Microsoft would have to continue using a more expensive, 8 chip configuration for memory and use 8 gigabit chips at that. You'd have to hope that 8 gigabit chips are even economical to produce by the time the next generation comes around, especially high speed ones at that which tend to be considerably more expensive to produce. You'd also have to hope that Microsoft/Sony would be willing to use 8 of them... With each node becoming more expensive it may not be feasable to expect to see RAM produced on a cutting edge process node anymore.

Can you link me to where the original Xbox had 128MB of ram? The official technical specs have it listed at 64MB. I know some people upgraded, but the stock version only had 64, AFAIK.

It won't be more then 4gb of ram. Filling and pushing around 8gb is going to take up even more processor time. My pc has 1.5gb dedicated video memory and 6gb of system ram. No game comes close to using even half of that. Crysis 2 devs just want it since they're used to the load everything in memory first then run the game pc mentality.

To go from 720p to 1080p is 2.25x more pixels. Double the texture resolution should be sufficient, 4x the texture memory. So that makes 1gb of video memory. I wouldn't be surprised if the next gen won't have more then 2gb of memory.

Hopefully they'll wait long enough that ssd drives become affordable and fast enough. The optical drive and hdd speed are the biggest limiting factors. Installing the game from a 6x blu-ray drive onto ssd drive should give fast random access to game data and not take an hour to install. Otherwise load times will be 4x as long as well. Loading a decompressing a level into 8gb of memory with current hardware would take, well at least as long as installing the whole dvd to your hdd on 360.

It had 64MB of ram, but in 128 mbit (16 MB) chips, with 4 chips for a 128 bits channel. 360 has 8 chips, each 64 MB (512 mbit) , for a total of 512 MB in a 256 bits configuration. Each chip has a 32 bits channel.

Ah, I see. At any rate, though, one should still assume that due to Moore's law, we should see a significant increase from last generation. Moore's law is doubling every 18 months, give or take. 6 years would equal 8 doublings, which should mean a pretty notable increase.

GT5 was patched to have a multi screen set-up.  Up to 5 screens i think.

Foundries haven't been capable lately to keep pace with the Moore's law. I think  2-4 GB is a reasonable number.

Nice...the more games support this, the better

It's slowing down though, there are limits. Otherwise we would have 12 to 16 ghz processors already and 60k rpm hdds. I also doubt the next hardware is going to have 24 processor cores, or 64 cell spus.

Memory and hdd size can keep pace, but it's no use it you can't process it all fast enough. Memory bandwidth is the biggest problem, get the data from/to the right core(s) fast enough.

Graphics cards can keep pace since they take the biggest advantage of parallel processing. Looking at the gtx 590, they're up to 1024 cores now, but still no more then 1.2ghz processor speed. And 365W power consumption! Run that in quad sli and it's like running the microwave on high continuously lol.

Developers already have trouble to split their code into taking advantage of 3 cores or 6 spus. Splitting the code up to use 24 cores will require a new way of making games.

Edit: quad config 'only' takes 730W, just 2 cards. It's already 2 cards together apparently.