Stuff like this probably won't be realistic to put into games until maybe 12 to 15 years from now should Moore's law still hold up. By then we I'd assume that'd we'd have consoles that are powerful enough to render early 2002 CG movies in real-time, or at least close to it. If cloud gaming is still a thing in 7 years, then it might evolve enough to the point where it will be a dramatic leap forward and be able to have graphics that far surpass anything a $400 console could offer. Hell, it should be able to out-do even PC gaming rigs if things evolve enough as cloud computing is way beyond anything a single computer can do.

Well we do - they're just confined to PC's at the moment. The thing that bugs me about zbrush is just how quick the pros can use it. Some of those models may have been kicked up within a day which really puts the finger up to the people crying that good graphics cost too much.

Even the best PC games don't even have a 10th of the polycount of the source sculpts. The sculpts are 1+ million polygons (on the low end), and the highest I have seen reported in a PC game is ~100k for a huminoid character.

Anyway I hope I live to see the day where 1 million poly character models are possible in real time gameplay.

Polygon counts haven't really increased dramatically from the 6th gen to the 7th, mainly because the use of normal mapping to fake extra geometry became mainstream.

1 million polygon count is the ideal deal. It should take the beast of a hardware to render a single character model in real-time.

"Depends on the complexity of the character, but nowadays as an average it takes around 30 days for a main character including modeling (zbrush included) , texturing and shading."

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?171132-Blur-Studio-Farcry-3-Cinematic-Character-Art

well if you were just displaying one model with no background 1 million polys wouldn't really be a problem on even todays hardware. a large chunk of the model would be culled on the back face and games have been pushing 1+ million polys per frame for quite a while now. 

Not that it really means much to have a single character model floating in empty space. 

I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidias New Dawn tech demo got quite close with tesselation.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/a-new-dawn-directx-11-demo-available-for-download

You've never heard of tessellation then? Since the GTX400 series, hardware has been able to kick out 1.6 BILLION triangles a second...And the GTX680 is about x2 as powerful as the GTX480 so go figure. 

http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/The_Technology_Behind_the_Elemental_Demo_16x9_(2).pdf
Has over 1 million particles in the demo.

sure but that procedurally generates polygons, sure you probably can't tell the difference and is in many cases far better and much more flexable than just using super complex models. But it is still not the same thing, and we are still many years away from seeing that level of detail in games even with tesselation.

And we all know synthetic numbers like that are meaningless. And the fact that the elemental demo has tech that allows 1 million particles is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

ANd the poly counts in the ellemental demo aren't that impressive 

The thing is having a high polycount isn't always a good thing. For example it's been a widely used trick for years now that in 3ds max (a professional 3d render program) that you only have as many polygons as is required. For example, the lecture I saw stated that there is no point in having a 1000 polygon teapot, and one that is made up of only 30 if the viewing distance is greater then 20 meters as you won't be able to perceive the difference. Therefore many scenes are rendered with the optimal amount of polygons in hollywood animation as this saves on time (and therefore cost) and the end result is not percievably different.  Tesselation simply does this on the fly. Gunning for high polycount regardless of the scene isn't a goal anyone should, or actually does, aim for. 

I think you need to step back and ask just how many polygons you actually want to see. The fact that particle effects (not polygons I know) are reaching over 1 million particles, while having tesselation available, really is quite remarkable:

How many triangles is that? Same with this one: