Guys digital sculptor...

Million poly characters have been created for years now, not for ingame, so don't get to excited yet.

Why only 75K when Kratos and Uncharted already have 30K this gen? 75k per model would only be a x3 increase when next gen hardware possibly will be 10 times more powerful.

And last gen games had up to 10k for the highest poly models during cutscenes just like this gen tops out at 40k for cutscene models. But the average last gen was arround 2-4k for a main character in game and this gen it's arround 10k augmented by bump/normal maping to give the illusion of much more detailed models. Next gen will have high quality bump/normal mapping and much more importantly Tessellation which means detail can be generated from a displacement map in real time from a lower poly model allowing for Samaritan level closeups without having to actually store and load the full detail model. If anything 75k is optomistic TBH, other factors are more important like lighting and textures plus the draw distance and the number of characters you can have on screen.

Okay, that explains the proportions very well.

A question on Tesselation in next gen games. Can they put different levels of tesselation like with AA and AF or is tesselation just an "on" or "off" function? Like in the Unigine demo I hate the extreme level of tesselation on the rocks on the pavement, it's totally unrealistic and looks stupid with heavy tesselation like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkKtY2G3FbU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ69oChXH5g&feature=related

The poly standards this gen shows how much effort Capcom put on Leon for GC RE4.

Pity the PC version was a port of the PS2 one with half poly count for Leon and crappy lighting effects. Bumb up the res and it would trully look like a early 7th gen game.

Whoa.. UC2 Drake has more polygons and GoW3 Kratos? Damn ND

If they could start at least using real 1080p on games before adding polys...

This, good res and AA are most important for right now as well as proper textures.

Lets put it this way that Haven demo has a slider to adjust the level of tessellation in real time lol, most people crank it up to max so the difference is more pronounced. One of the main advantages is you can scale it in real time so closer you get more detail is added etc, of course on consoles it will be up to the developer to set the level of tesselation etc but I doubt they will go to the extreams that certain tech demos do as they will be trying to maintain realism or keep to their art style the huge displacement seen on the roads in heaven are very unlike to be seen in actual games.

Of course there are other uses for tesselation as well not just adding detail to models or enviroments it can also be used for effects like smoke and water and also for things like realtime deformation for much more realistic destruction, like for example you could use tesselation to make realistic craters in the ground etc, it really very cool technology.

This is one of my personal favorite DX11 tessellation demos, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzULTgyn-3U, I can't wait for games to start utalising things like this the possibilities are endless. 

so it's started. the mysteries and rumors regarding new consoles start as usual. i remember sony once claimed ps2 is a "nurbs-console", with ps3 the cell was guarded in clouds of speculation :) and the fans are eager to hear about new technology from their beloved companies they buy from. and no: most probably the character model will not have million polygons. just look at the high-end pc-hardware right now, take their abilities and *this* is the upper limit for future console-techniques in terms of graphics.