Games have a bit more breathing room than movies. There aren't really any lod systems in place in movies so that seriously hurts rendering time. BUT we're still way off. I say atleast 20 years to get to Avatar quality. Regular computers today are way more powerful than the super computers of yester year so it's not too unbelievable.

With the the law of diminishing returns and the huge amounts of data working against us I doubt we will have "photo-realistic gaming" for a very long, long time.

I believe 10 years sounds reasonable. Not on consoles, though, even if the next generation is already out.

I say at least double that. 20 years (at least).

I voted 30

Pikmin 3 has photorealistic fruits. It just depends on what youre talking about. at what scale?

There isn't some kind of end-state for graphics. We'll just be improving it again and again as time goes on. Some games will look really close to being real, but they'll never be 100% spot on.

Great movie Ang Lee's second best movie the best is still Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but Life of Pi is almost as good.

aldeady achieve with metal gear solid 4 on pc with sublime light effect mod and npc enhancer

Well, if we directly inscribe on Moore's Law (which is a theory not a law by the way.) Then the 4 hours a single frame of Avatar took to render will be about 7 minutes in 2020.

Must most of us don't have 4K stereo 3D TV's in our house (but hopefully we might then!)

But computer innovation isn't strictly linear. Sometimes things happen in leaps an bounds. There are breakthroughs in processing that improve things great with a great leap. So that would be 7 minutes if we rendered Avatar in the exact same was as was done in 2008. Fortunately, other innovations can happen that have a exponential effect.

Look at this example of how Microsoft is using DirectX 8.2. They are using 3 GB of data from Mars to show a real time map, but only using 16 MB of memory on the graphics card.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I5TEpAnuEg

The one with the planes? They are 4GB each plane (there are 4), 32GB for the terrain. So they use 36GB of data and run in a way that uses dramatically less ram.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idKk6fn0AlA

It's like trying to find a letter in the alphabet? If you only count from the begging, then you have to go through all the numbers to find that Z is 26. But if you use a binary tree, it only takes you 5 steps. Just as accurate, but so much less processing time.

Tim Sweeney probably has a rather good idea. I think the current gen's HD Twins can be rather amazing - and the new Super HD Twins are even better. It's not just graphic power, but other innovations that will get us to photo-realism.

Honestly, photorealism doesn't interest me all that much. I'd rather graphics be stylistically interesting.

In the 7th gen, even Wii games like Muramasa, Kirby's Epic Yarn, and Super Mario Galaxy looked better to me than just about any high end "realistic" games on PS3/360/PC.

Hell, I still think Yoshi's Island looks beautiful, and that's running on a miniscule 64kb of VRAM.