So I was looking up some stuff online and saw an article saying that we will achieve it within a decade. Do you think this is likely? Now to my second question, would it be affordable for pc/consoles to run games at that high settings? Would it be for those people who spend absurd amounts of money on gaming pc's?

According to Epic’s Tim Sweeney, we may just have photorealistic games in 10 years time. How could we possibly achieve it? Is it actually a good thing?  

At the Develop Conference, Epic’s co-founder and creator of Unreal Engine, Tim Sweeney, predicted that we may have photorealistic, real-time games in 10 years. In a quote on Eurogamer, Sweeney say that “It’s continuing to improve at Moore’s Law rate. Things are going to get really interesting. We’ll be able to render environments that are absolutely photo-realistic within the next 10 years, like indistinguishable from reality level of graphics.” This is heartening for those gamers yearning for an incredibly immersive experience and are constantly being disappointed by sprites and low-res graphics.

http://screencrush.com/we-may-have-photorealistic-video-games-in-10-years/

Even movies rendered on 104Tb of RAM with 40,000 processors aren't truly 100% photorealistic. It's a long, long way off.

naughty dog already achieved it with their games

Pretty much that.

The computer(s) used to render Avatar, for example, are beyond anything we'll see in the gaming world for many many years to come, if ever.

Here's an article detailing the computer power used to render Avatar. 

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/22/the-data-crunching-powerhouse-behind-avatar/

"It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar.  Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.

The 10,000 square foot server farm manages thousands of work orders and a serious amount of data. Information Management magazine reports on the creative artists and rendering done for the movie, as well as the thoroughbred data center supporting it.

The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2x220c blades (new BL2x220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.

 Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn said that heat exchange for their servers had to be enclosed. The “industry standard of raised floors and forced-air cooling could not keep up with the constant heat coming off the machines,” said Gunn. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local.” The solutions was the use of water-cooled racks from Rittal.

Gunn also noted that tens of thousands of dollars were saved by fine tuning the temperature by a degree.  Weta won an energy excellence award recently for building a smaller footprint that came with a 40 percent lower cooling cost for a data center of its type.

For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage. For a 166 minute movie the rendering coordination was intense."

something like the tiger in life of pi or even more realistic? well, i think something like the tiger and that as whole game where everything is only computer graphics will probably take much longer as ten years.

off topic: Is life of pi any good? It did win a few awards, but what do you personally think?

didn't see it yet haha

but we will have 8GB DDR5 and power of Cloud! This year right?



anyway: maybe in 6/7 years in 9 gen. I really believe next gen consoles will have more than 32GB RAM and better CPU's

I just hope it doesn't take more then 20 years to happen. How much would it cost to run these graphics in the future though? Do you think, it will be affordable once photo-realism is achieved in gaming?

depends on how you define photo realistic, if we are talking a single static object you could probably achieve a quality level indistinguishable from reality to a casual observer today. If we are talking a huge dynamic scene in gameplay with numerous human characters that stands up to close inspection in motion, then we may never reach true photo realism.