So much bitterness in here...

The graphics card rumored to power ther PS4 is a 2011 graphics card.  Pretty pathetic compared to previous generations where they were already years behind pc when they launched a new system.

That sounds to be completely off..  The next generation systems are said to only be 6 or 7 times more powerfully than their current gen counterparts which put them roughly 3 times as powerfull as the wiiu.. last gen they has systems 10 times as powerfull as Nintendo.  It won't be the same situation by a long shot.

All we heard from PS4 is that is using an APU10 that is hardly more powerful than the Wii U. I don't know where you get the "4-6 times more powerful" than Wii U. Perhaps it is two times more powerful (but only if PS4 really gets a great extra GPU, otherwise it will be slower than Wii U in some cases).

The PS3 was not efficiently designed, it has a great CPU (even with todays standards!), but the GPU and the overall technical design was inefficiently, so the developers could never really use the CPU power efficiently. Same goes for the Vita, great tech specs on paper, but the graphical games like Uncharted or AC:Liberation runs only with half screen resolution and look only a bit better than Revelations on 3DS, but they run only without 3D of course.

No doubt the ps4 and 720 will have significantly more power but it won't actually amount to that much. Not a gigantic generational leap like we've seen in the past. The power will mostly be gobbled up by 1080p and 60 fps locked.

Here's what John Carmack had to say.

"Any creative vision that a designer could come up with, we can do a pretty good job representing on current generation and certainly on PC. In many ways I am not all that excited about the next generation. It will let us do everything we want to do now, with the knobs turned up. If you take a current game like Halo which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you've sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation. It will be what we already have, but a lot better."

The die size of a Geforce 7900GTX is 196mm^2 and it has 300M transistors and it is clocked at 650Mhz whereas a modern 7870 has 2.8B transistors @ 212mm^2 and clocks at 1Ghz. A lot can change in 7 years as you can possibly imagine and the GPU in the Xbox 360 is a mere 200M transistors so one fairly modern and doable graphics cores has 14* the transistors, 12* the flops and 6* the memory bandwidth. This is a GPU which is the exact same size as the one which launched in the Xbox 360 so it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to think of it as a solid contender. Given the fact that the CPU is likely to be quite efficient and low power it stands to reason that a reasonable console which consumes ~ 140W could be released with this GPU inside. The next generation consoles won't be slackers from a performance stand-point and it does stand to good reason that given a significantly higher power budget and more modern processors it'll yield 4-6 times higher performance than the Wii U.

The chances of Sony releasing a console which is anything less than half a dozen times more powerful than the PS3 is slight. The chances of Sony releasing a console which is inefficient is also slight. The most likely rumours point to an APU plus a GPU which is why I said slight instead of impossible because it is still only a rumour.

They did it with the PS2 and PS3...

Most PS3 launch games were either built on the PS3 or ported over the already next gen X360.   Wii U ports are coming over from last generation consoles.  Again, if the assets are the same, it won't look better.   PS3 also had the advantage of a huge jump in resolution over last generation consoles.   That won't be nearly as noticable even going from 720p to 1080p.  The jump from 480 to 720 was huge.  The jump from 720 to 1080 is not (visually speaking that is).  The other factor is that the PS3 was touted as the most powerful console ever and developers were tasked to prove it graphically.  So every game was pushed.  On Wii U, the focus is far more on the GamePad (which also has a screen with 410k extra pixels).  

The main thing to consider is are the assets.  If developers are using the exact same asset (and they usually will because it's much cheaper than creating a whole new set of art assets), you will not see a marked improvement in graphic quality.    Think about a game being rendered on a very high end graphics card on the PC and the same game rendered on a middle ground card.   The former will give you much better frame rates but the game will essentially look exactly the same because the art assets are exactly the same.   Even a low end card can look the same...just run like shit.

Another way of looing at this.   Crysis on PC came out 5 years ago.  But do we really have a lot of PC games looking a full generation ahead?  No, we don't.   Some may look marginally better but not like you'd expect a console leap to do despite having graphics cards that are much, much more powerful than 5 years ago.   It's all about the assets.

Neither of those companies have designed an efficient console...ever.  How in the world do you assume they'll start now and be more efficient than the very efficiently designed Wii U?

PS2 was a beast spec wise.  As is the PS3.   Can either console use all that power?  Not at all.  Not even close.    Look at the GC.   The way the console moves data is efficient.  Devs could tap the full power of the console without leaving wasted clock cycles along the way.  That's efficiency.

I thought this thread was meant to be about Black Op 2, not Wii U VS 720/PS4, We have enough of those already.