Far in 8th gen.
in 9th gen, even in nintendo.
i think this gen is very impressive.

We already havent seen the best os PS4 and X1.

Considering the leap we've seen in the past 10 years I am going to be very optimistic and say we'll see that quality in less than ten years. The hardware and the talent is already in place. We've seen skin texture that absorb surrounding light instead of reflect like plastic, dynamic lighting that works in a sandbox environment so not only the models on screen look amazing but we have a world where our eyes believe we're looking through a window.

I offer Final Fantasy 15 as an example of a title that may be taking some advantage of the next gen hardware no matter what they accomplish they are coming from the position of being just recently removed from the previous hardware generation. Just think about the potential, what we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg.

Hell, just take a look at the 360 and ps3 launch titles to see how far we've come.
Anyone remember Kameo?
How about Madden 2007?

Go look them up and be disgusted.

I would say pretty close. I saw a video where they put these two heads together to compare them. A real one, and the other was cg, and you couldn't tell the difference.

I remember when 512MB of RAM was WOW. a 4GB HDD was OMG!

In 15-30 years, 104TB of memory will look like nothing.

We'll achieve realism within 20 years, but it won't be used in every title. 
Art style is going to be perfected.

For example, Mario in 20 years isn't going to be any different besides better anti-aliasing and more polygons...maybe some better textures..but nothing realistic.

Call of Duty, on the other hand, will still be around and will be almost indistinguishable from reality...visual-wise.

I remember when my family bought its first PC in 1995, my Dad wanted to buy the one with 32MB of RAM, and the guy he asked for the upgrade (over the 16MB bundle he was trying to sell us) was like, "mate, you'll never need 32MB of memory".

To some extent I've been hearing this talk since the PS1/N64 era, and I'm still waiting on it. With the exception of racing games like Gran Turismo, no game on any of the platforms have given me that impression in video form.

GT5/6 come pretty damn close, especially that vid that compared the same track from GT5 and the real life version.

I think 10 years is too unrealistic. Maybe around 15+ years when the 10th or 11th generation of game consoles roll in (assuming there will be a 10th or 11th gen). I mean, the PS4 and X1 seem to be near photo realistic, but not quite there yet. I'm sure, though, that devs will learn how to use the consoles power to its full potential in the future. That goes for Wii U as well :)

You know what's funny? Around the year 2000, when PS2 was releases, I read an article in a magazine about "photo realistic graphics". The people were really impressed from the PS2 graphics and guess what they said. They said, we will have photo-realism in 10 years. They said, in 10 years "games will look like TV". Oh, well, maybe they were referring to Xbox One... (jk)

Funny, 10 years have passed and games still look like games. Sure, you have those nice little tech demos, but those graphics aren't used by any game whatsoever.There are also more problems than just power. You need very talented designers who can bring realistic conditions into a game. And once you stop talking about "photo realism" and start talking about just realism, oh boy. You'll need realistic animations than. Animations that don't repeat themselves over and over again, as that isn't realistic. You need NPCs who move naturally, talk naturally...

tl;dr - We're very far away from realism in games in any possible way.

i have no clue how people can think that. even gt8 and forza 7 or whatever won't look like reality if you play them. 

how is the gt academy demo even close to photorealism? maybe i understand something different as that as other people do but for me photorealsm is if a painting of let's say a building looks like a photo of it and with that i think a game would have to look like a movie (with real environment and actors and not a cgi movie), you see that the people are real actors just presented on a tv screen and not computer graphics.

when i see a replay of a race in gt or other racing games i don't have the feeling to see a replay of a real race, i see computer graphics.

few of the project cars pictures are close to it but still not there (sometimes bad ground textures and so on) and that are also only pics. the gameplay doesn't look as good as the pics.