if the leap between ps3 and ps4 is a good one it wont be a problem

"MikeB will convince us all" should have been an option.

I dont care. the games will look pretty never the less, and Im into their IPs

Actually, the PS2 was stronger than the Dreamcast. The PS1 was more powerful than the Amiga CD32, 3DO, and Atari Jaguar.

I think console gamers will soon realize their expectations are not aligned with reality regarding how graphics evolution works and how hardware and graphics evolved in the past. Think of it as a track athlete: learning to walk from childhood, then to run, then to compete in high school, college level, national level and Olympic level. The early stages are easier to conquer and later it becomes ever so more difficult until every 1 hundreds of a second separates thousands of pro track athletes in the world.  The next revolution in graphics requires such exponential increases in hardware performance, it's well outside the realm of PS4/Xbox 720 or Wii U -- this is not coming from me, but from the leading game developers in the world.

I suggest people go on Youtube and find "Unreal Engine 3: Official Samaritan Demo":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXyztq_0uM

Now ask yourselves, does Samaritan Unreal Engine 3 look next generation to you? That's the BEST next generation consoles will be able to do. The Samaritan demo needs 10x the power of Xbox 360 and its graphics are not THAT revolutionary compared to today's best looking games:

"Last week Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told DICE 2012 attendees that the tech demo of Unreal Engine 3 released last year, called "Samaritan," required 2.5 terraFLOPS to run at a 1920 x 1080 resolution, 30 frames per second and with 48 operations per pixel (that rig was a monster in size too). By comparison, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is only capable of 0.25 terraFLOPS, meaning Microsoft will need to generate a new console at least ten times more powerful in order to run the UE3 demo smoothly. 

Sweeney estimated during DICE 2012 that a complete approximation of "perfect" visual quality requires computing power of around 2,000 times greater than today's hardware. A "good enough" approximation of visual reality is 5,000 teraFLOPS, or 5,000 trillion floating point operations per second. Looks like consoles have a long way to go before they reach the "good enough" state, if that even happens."

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/UE3-UE4-Samaritan-Tim-Sweeney-Mark-Rein,14698.html

There you have it - to just move beyond this generation marginally, we need hardware 10x more powerful than Xbox 360 and for truly visually impressive graphics, 20,000x the power of Xbox 360, or 2,000x more powerful than today's PCs.

Just to create 1 next generation game character on screen in real life with real-time generated hair and somewhat realistic skin requires $1,000 of modern GPUs.

Sure, this looks nice but probably won't have a WOW factor like going from PS1 to PS2 to PS3 was. I also don't think PS4 will even reach this level above because to get there, you need 2x GTX680s or about 22-24x the power of PS3's GPU and this is just 1 such character on screen not 10 or 20 like in Assassin's Creed. There is no way PS4 will have 2x GTX680s under the hood so what you see above is likely well beyond PS4/Xbox 720/Wii U to begin with.

For this very reason, imo the mind-blowing graphical increases from 1 generation to the next are behind us forever. The first time we went from 2D to 3D and from 3D to complex lighting, shadows and shader effects was mind-blowing. From here on out, it's like climbing Mount Everest with baby steps.

Thus, as long as next generation games run at full 1080P with anti-aliasing and DX11 effects, I am focusing on the gameplay and quality of exclusive titles. If Sony delivers in this area, it won't need to be the most powerful console to be worth purchasing :)

I have a feeling a lot of gamers are already pretty happy with PS3's graphics today. Moving to native 1080P at 60 fps would be a nice improvement. The keys to PS4's success will be its exclusives and price point. As noted in this thread, PS1 and PS2 were not the most powerful consoles in their respective generations but proved widely popular due to their games.

PS1's main competitor was N64 not the consoles you listed. N64 was much more powerful graphically and even had an expansion pack that allowed it to have higher resolution in certain games - well beyond PS1's graphical capability of the time. PS2's main competitors were Xbox 1 and Gamecube, not Dreamcast (which was discontinued just a year later afer PS2's release). Both Gamecube and Xbox 1 were more powerful than PS2 was.

Also, while the overall processing power of PS3 is arguably superior to Xbox 360 once all the CPU units are utilized effectively, the actual graphics card in PS3 is inferior to Xbox 360 not only in performance but in technology. Xbox 360, despite being a 1 year older console, uses a unified shader graphics architecture (which is the industry standard today), while PS3 uses a fixed pixel/vertex shader pipeline design of the past. That means even this generation PS3 wasn't the hands down graphical power house either, as most cross-platform games run and look better on Xbox 360. Without very serious code optimizations, i.e., offloading certain effects to the Cell, PS3 is actually a less powerful console than 360 is graphically.

i deleted most of your most because t was really long. and to answer your question  "does Samaritan Unreal Engine 3 look next generation to you? "

yes it does. there is a good enough leap between the samaritian and this gen console graphics. if next gen consoles manage to make games that good looking ill be really really happy. no current gen game comes even close to the samaritian

Smart thinking bananaking21 for not quoting my entire post with pics. :) 

Sorry I wrote so much; just wanted to bring some clarity so that people have a rough idea of the next progression in graphics and what the expectations are. I do think the Samaritan Demo does look nice but it also brings us to the point of people's dissappointment with Wii U. Developers are unlikely to embrace next generation game engines and spend millions to make games look like the Samaritan Demo, unless there is a very large install base of gamers with capable hardware to justify these types of investments. Unfortunately, the Wii U cannot support this level of graphics, which already means the market for developers just shrunk by 1/3. In other words, PS4's graphical leap is very much tied to Xbox 720 from a developer perspective. If Xbox 720 doesn't come anywhere close to 10x as powerful as Xbox 360, we'll end up with 2 consoles (Wii U and 720) that didn't reach the specs required to pull off Samaritan Demo graphics. By that hypothesis, if the PS4 is way more powerful than Xbox 720 and Wii U, will the developers actually take the time and spend extra $ to make better looking games specifically for it or will it end up with a gluttony of poor ports? The counterpoint, if Xbox 720 is way more powerful than PS4, will developers bother making much better looking games for Xbox and neglect PS4? Doubtful. 

Chances are we will end up with a similar situation to Xbox 360 vs. PS3, Genesis vs. SNES, PS2 vs. Gamecube, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about PS4 not beating Xbox 720. It is the Wii U that appears to be an outlier for next generation console race. What has me worried is that such a weak next gen console with minimal storage costs $300-$350. Sony and MS surely cannot afford to release $499-599 consoles in this economy but can they pack a fast enough next gen system into a $300-400 price range? The Wii U couldn't, despite dropping mechanical hard drives, cost cutting with cheap plastics that scratch easily, lack of USB 3.0 ports, lack of optical out, no BluRay drive, just 1GB of system memory. Let's hope that is largely because of the Wii U's expensive GamePad.

One main reason why PS3 was such a powerhouse was because Sony took massive losses on each console sold. Given their financial situation, they simply can't cope with a similar strategy. 

Sony probably wont make PS4 to powerful. After all they kind of made the PS3 ahead of its time in my opinion. They put so much technology into it they resorted to selling it at a loss for years until it was profitable.

I think PS4 will have high quality graphics, but less features built in. Like no PS3 b/c etc. they might make add on peripherals for that kind of stuff lol

i remember reading that the gamepad of the wiiU costs an equivalent of about 150$ in japan. so it does add money to each console sold. also i think that the wiiU's disk drive would cost more than a blueray drive because bluerays are every where and they have been making them for years, but wiiu's drive was custom made by nintendo and made specifically for the console.