Okay here's how I see it:

PS3 costs $300 today.

If we are to have a significantly more powerful console in the next 2 years, it would have to be like the PS3 at it's launch: $600 at a significant loss to Sony. I don't see that happening again, what with their financial situation, plus the global economy.

The argument of PCs being better than consoles is invalid to this discussion. Of course high-end PCs are better, that happens to consoles after a few years. But high-end PCs cost more (let's NOT get into a PC-building discussion) to get those better graphics (at the very least $500 for a PC you won't have to replace in a year). And when you factor in blu-ray, bluetooth, absurdly expensive controllers...don't count on a significantly more powerful console in next 2 years. At least not at a reasonable price.

Not until XBox and PS3 are both under $150 should you expect a decent new console.

we will know when they announce it... xP

I was comparing what PCs were capable of in 1998/1999 to what the PS2, hardware from 2000, was capable of. If you play, let's say, Silent Hill 3 on a PS2 released in Y 2000, it will work... if you try to play that on a PC from 1998/1999, it most probably won't run... or if it does, it will run like crap. That's because consoles usually surpass the capabilities of the best PCs from 1 or 2 years before the console is released.

Try to compare what Half-Life 2 looked like in PCs from 2004 (the year it was released on PC) instead of using hardware from today to make the comparison. What was the best videocard in that year?, I think the 7800GT was released in 2005, that means the best GPU of that year (2004) was worse than that... and the Xbox 360 was released in 2005 with the Xenos GPU, which is as powerful as a 7800GT or GTX (I don't remember which one). Do you really think the PCs from 2004 would be able to run stuff like Gears of War 3?

If history repeats itself again, next gen consoles should have a video card as good or better than the top of the line cards of today (06/22/2011), surpassing what PCs of today can do and making another generational leap in graphics. Asuming consoles are released in 2013 (2 years gap), PCs of today will probably have problems running what the next gen consoles will be able to run. PCs of 2011 (with single Video Cards) probably won't be able to run games that consoles of 2013 will be running in 2017. But of course PCs of 2017 will run those games better, lol.

And why are you telling me that? 500% MORE powerful does mean 6x AS powerful... but I said my PC is 5x MORE powerful which means 500% MORE powerful. It would've been different if I said AS like you but I said MORE :P And I already know 100% more powerful is 2x as powerful... xD

Lets take an example Power 7 8 Core running at 4 ghz and gtx 580 (expensive in 2011 cheap in 2013.)

RSX has about 300 million transistors the gf 110 like found in the gtx 580 has 3000 million transistors its 3 generations ahead. the newest fastest gpus at the end of 2013 will have 8000-10000 Million transistors same goes for cpus ofcourse which have less transistors because of the higher complexity.

Ofcourse this doesnt translate into direct power increase but we will see a 10 times more powerful console at a moderate price of 449 with a little subvention from MS and Sony 50 dollars maybe. And this could be the Hardware : Power 7 with 8 Cores upto 4 ghz build in 28/22 nm. Currently build in 45 nm smaller size smaller price less energy consumption they are already fairly cheap and by 2013 old news. improved gtx 580 or maybe a year old hd 7xxx with a r1000 gpu 3000-6000 million transistors build in 28/22nm. 4 gb ddr 3 ram 1-2 gb vram. 8x-bluray or proprietary format based on bluray. energy consumption not much more then ps3 and xbox 360 at launch increase in raw power 8-12 times btw thats conservative who knows what sony and ms get for deals and how good the architecture is and dont forget console programming can be done very hardware near, the whole potential will be used sooner or later unlike pcs which have to give a lot of power for windows and unefficent programming.


Graphically there is a lot to improve i could live with 720p thats not the most pressing issue for me aslong as yout keep your distance from the tv.

But low res textures screen tearing low draw distance not enough details antialiasing non existent or not enough. texture popins partially under 30 fps no aa on shadows dead space on ps 3 just slipped in my mind where the shadows look like someone made them out of legos. As long as you dont notice it everything its fine but once you recognize it it becomes a continous nuissance. it took me 2 years to get used to hd console graphics and now the flaws are so obvious that hd consoles look slowly like last gen. 1080p and 60 fps are nice to have but there is so much more to improve I doubt we will see much of these games with just a 1000% power increase.Maybe in the beggining but programmers will soon realize that their games will look better in sub 1080p. There are so many ways to improve graphics that i really hope developers will use the more on power for other things better lighting more crispier textures extreme drawdistance smooth edges tesselation for complex geometry way more details way more animated objects like wildlife in a forest this will make a game look like next gen. 10 times the power is the least ms and sony should attempt to jump into the next gen. anything less wouldnt be substantial and visible enough for most consumers.

WII U already is stronger then ps 3 or xbox 360 the cpu is a power 7 probably a quad with 3.2 ghz is definetly stronger then xbox 360 cpu and should offer the same power as the cell with its single precisson cores at double precission and the r770 gpu is noticably more powerful then the other ones. if its really the r770 like they say (2008gpu) I guess wiiu will have twice the power of ps3 and xbox 360 but most people wont even notice it.

So, 100% more powerful and we have a heavy price tag? Are you aware video cards five times more powerful than the whole PS3 are like $150 to manufacture already, about the price of RSX or Xenos back when PS360 were released?

unfortunately, that kind of comparison doesn't mean a thing because consoles weren't PC-like until Xbox came around, the PS2 doesn't even have a GPU type component in it lol, the hard part back in the days was changing the code to fit on another platform because they are very different, and while PS2 ran on mostly very low native res, PCs were already at HD res back then. Gears of War 3 would run on PCs from 2004 if they port the code properly and not be half assed about it, DX9 was already there, and the best PCs in 2004 can handle the game, the thing is, the 360 would still have came out cheaper at the same performance vs PC price if you count the dollar value, that's the actual difference.

Yes, there will be 4x as many pixels, but that does not mean a 4x jump in overall power. PS360 suffer from only 512MB of RAM, they both could probably run Uncharted 3 or equivalent graphiced games at 1080p with 60FPS if they just doubled the RAM. Worse case 2GB of RAM. No processor or GPU upgrade.

My friend plays PC games at 1080P 60FPS, and his PC's specs are not much greater then PS360.

RAM is a bottleneck this gen.

People with a degree don't earn that much less than let's say Western Europeans. The 'cheap' Polish workers are mostly from smaller cities/villages and don't have a degree. 

I have this information from a UK magazine where they talked about businesses in East Europe and how some were surprised what (especially the youth with a degree) demanded for salary.

It's actually 5x as many pixels per seccond, plus things like physics, AI and input proccessing need to be handled twice as fast when runing at 60fps vs 30, but it's not a liniar increase. And if you freind is playing at 1080p 60fps with similar level of detail as consoles then his PC is much more powerful than consoles as API overhead and poor optomisation has an impact on performance. 

Well he built his PC for the price of a PS3, and it is more powerful, but not by much. The main thing is his computer doesn't bottleneck like consoles.

I think to run games like Uncharted 3, and Crysis 2 at full 1080p resoltuion, 60FPS, you need max double the power. Resolution issues can be fixed with more RAM and graphics, physics, and AI can be handled with a stronger graphics card. Also 30 and 60 FPS makes no difference to people. We can only see something like 28.5 FPS. We only notice screen tearing because FPS drop below that threshold.

Regardless, just running in native 1080p makes a huge difference. I've seen Mass Effect 2 and Crysis the way they were built to be played, it's nuts. I can only imagine how good games will look when they start developing next gen engines, built for next gen games.