Metroid Prime 2, RE4, Twilight Princess......

The only system architecture this truly happened with was the Dreamcast's, Sega only resorted to that that after being absolutely hounded for the infamous dual-processor quadrilateral output the Saturn had. (and you guys think the PS2 or PS3 was bad).

Point being, the Dreamcast more often than not struggled to run the Shenmue games. Perhaps future DC games could've retained those visuals with a cleaner framerate but, y'know...

Thanks for the responses guys. And yeah I know they are not maxed right now, and it will take a few years.

There's more to "maxing" out a machine than what people think. Just because they have x86 architecture doesn't mean that the "total" system is maxed out. There are other things to account for such GPU architectures like AMDs GCN GPU supporting new and advanced features to be taken advantage of even though GPU programming has become fairly easier with the new architecture. Then you also have to consider memory architectures as well such as fast cache or hUMA so it's more complicated than what people think.

Much easier, no custom Cell architecture, no strange heavily modified GPUs this time around. Getting most power out of each console will be easy, optimizing will be a bit more difficult, but nowhere near the same as last gen. There is for example no secret to the Jaguar architecture that'll suddenly shoot up performance. They're in better positions for maxing out and optimizing than Wii U.

Yes, they will be, and it will benefit everybody besides Nintendo and ARM based platforms. They will also be able to push PC assets even further due to it.

Rogue Squadron 2 actually isn't very impressive at all if you understand what you're actually looking at, and same thing to a lesser extent with REmake. MP2 is far more impressive than anything else on the system by a longshot, and that arrived in 2004, the last serious year of support from Nintendo on the system.

I think they are already close to being maxed out because the extra power over last gen consoles has been eaten up straight away by the increase in resolution, frame rate and antialiasing.

its great we are getting proper HD resolutions and games that dont go below 30fps (on ps4 anyway) but I dont think anyone had their jaw dropping like they did when the first xbox 360 and ps3 games were shown.