for racers and maybe shooting games yes, everything else, I'm not so sure. A game should not have ultra realistic graphics, if those graphics are not helping make the game have better gameplay. LA noire would benefit from such graphics, but not Mario in my view. Also, I just feel the detail we get from games now are just right.

The Last of Us is just amazing graphically but it depends on how better graphics benefit the rest of the game as well

We're getting pretty close to having the processing power for physics to be a "solved" problem for anything you would really want to do in games, but the real question is what to do with those physical simulations.

Here is a tech demo from 2009:

Computational fluid dynamics is one of the most expensive things to simulate, and I could theoritically build a PC that could deal with some very large and realistic CFD effects in game; mind you, this PC wouldn't be cheap and would (most likely) be a graphics workstation with 2 processors which were both close to top of the line. When the next-next generation begins in (roughly) 2020 and we're using hybrid real-time raytracing and have advanced physics simulations we will be nearly able to create photo-realism with as close to real physics as a person can observe.

The problem (of course) is that producing content for games with that level of detail will be very expensive ... and the new problem will be creating procedural content to make game development affordable.

I believe Lair on PS3 actually used dynamic fluid simulation on the CELL processor for the water. Shame the game was crap so no-one's really seen it, lol.

PS4 for holiday 2014, and this is most definitely possible....maybe even greater.

Proper links:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-next-generation-codenames-revealed-2013-2014-2015-gpus-get-names/17154.html#ixzz271DhFlIb

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=492341

I've seen it :D

Graphics have a long way to go, and display technology is still no where close to reaching it's end point. As display technology advances, and goes beyond flat screens, 3d and higher resolution, more and more power will be needed.

Even looking at the current graphics, there is a long way to go to a living world. Giving life, depth, and weight to everything in the world is still a long way off. Hideo Kojima said during the onset of this generation that games needed to move away from the movie set, to become a real world. No more walls with nothing behind them and doors that lead to nowhere. This takes more power, more storage, and faster development techniques.

So even if we were to leave graphics right were they are from a visual stand point, we still need a lot more power to add depth to the worlds, weight to every object, and life to all living things.

Finally, I want to remind everyone that in all previous gens we have seen a minimum of an 8x increase over the previous gen. PS1 to PS2 and PS2 to PS3 both saw more than 10X increases in RAM, Geometry, Processing power, and many other aspects. This was done in 6 years time. Now we are looking at a generation that is going to last at least 7 years, if not 8 years. If anything we should be expecting greater increases than ever (12 to 14x) not the smallest increases of all time.

so how this compares to the one on the WiiU? 6760e or something.....:P
just curiosity

A looooot more powerful

I agree with that, but the most important problem is that, besides the power and storage to do that, developers would also need a lot of people and time to make that happen. That would make development costs to go through the roof and, therefore, games being a lot more expensive.

As Andrespetmonkey said, the difference would be huge. But it won't happen.