"general gaming people dont give a damn" I think it's possible you are wrong here. Resolution gate dramas,  responses from people over the Internet showed that many people specifically wanted Full HD games. And they showed it with their wallets (Devs most certainly noticed it too).

"Now what if (in 2016/2017 this might be true) many games especially first party sony studios start making PS4 games at 720p / 900p with jaw dropping graphics?" It won't happen at all. Zero chance. If you look at PS3 games, all first party games stayed at 720p (or native res for Beyond) and on the average third parties in fact increased their resolution of PS3 games ports in order to reach at least native 720p resolution (even if with small black bars).

Talking only about native resolution vs upscaled resolution, only one 60fps launch game on PS4 was upscaled, and it was officially a shitty buggy port of the PC game (should I say demo?) with zero console optimization at least on the GPU side (because people ran test on PC configs which proved this). I predict the next BF5 will be 1080p on PS4 (and maybe 900p on XB1). People have 1080p TVs and now expect to play native games on their shiny Full HD TVs.

I also predict that many more games will be 1080p on XB1, the gap will not widen, at least not the resolution gap. The difference of 60% will still be there but it will be shown in the framerates or effects/AA (like 60fps-ish/30fps-ish framerate with Tomb Raider DE or 2xMSAA/ZeroAA with NBA 2K14) and less with the resolution.

Yes NBA 2K14 on PS4 has (the great) 2xMSAA when it has Zero AA on XB1. Digital Foundry purposefully forgotten to review the game for its obvious partial agenda. It's called cherry picking.

And 900p on ultra looks better than 1080p on medium settings.

The games at the start of this gen are running on last gen engines.. Assassins.. Call of duty.. Maybe not bf4 or kz.. But one should expect visuals to improve at least a little more going into this gen.. Just 1080p at 60fps with a generational leap is going to be hard IMO.. Considering the ps4 is only 10 times more capable than the ps3..

I think it's like 4 or 5 times the power required to run at 1080p 60fps, vs 720p at 30fps..

Depending upon the complexity of an individual game, developers will have to prioritize resolution, frame rate and effects.

Sound a bit like gaming on a PC? The only difference will be resource consistency (all the same) which will mean developers, not players will be deciding which to place first.

One can see where the complaints might be with such an arrangement, but it also prevents gamers from doing pointless things like running a high resource game on high resolution with all effects sliders on max at unplayable frame rates. The whole idea of having visual options (AA, resolution, effects, physics) on a console seems pointless to me anyway. I'm curious to see whether that will ever be a thing on the PS4 or the XB1 in the future.

Moving into the future, one might logically conclude that as games become more complex, requiring more computing power and processing resources, performance will decrease proportionately, but this is console development we're talking about, not PC development where there are generally two targets: minimum spec and preferred spec. Having one standard build with predetermined specs actually makes it easier to set performance targets as opposed to the "design your game for future hardware" or "design your game to sell new VGA card upgrades" mentality. Most games tend to shoot for "design your game for the broadest possible consumer base" while giving some incentive to run their game on high end builds.

So it's not unreasonable to think some games might go to 720p if they're pushing hardware limits with the visuals or the developers are prioritizing 60fps, but I seriously doubt this will be the standard.

Plus, it also needs to be pointed out that as development code libraries continue to expand and refine and if need be, console OS can be streamlined to use fewer resources and optimize performance, and developers become more proficient at optimizing hardware resources, any good developer should be able to improve performance of their games while upping the ante on visuals. And this is something I fully expect to see in the future as we have in the past.

No it doesn't.  Clearly you can't read.

Yes, and that's not achieved by upscaling :)

And then there is reality in 4K

Achieved by downscaling from 8K scans of 70mm footage.

The next revolution in graphics will be real-time ray tracing, as long as that doesn't work the lighting will always seem off.

Really?

Yeah. There will be 720p games at PS4. Its for certain.

Well NBA 2K14 sold more than 4.37 millions combined, much more than Need for speed, a tiny bit more than NFL 25, is a great game (some say the best sport game on next gen) but it didn't deserve it's own digital foundry? And it's still selling great too, better than NFS or NFL.

I guess DF prefered to test the EA-Microsoft-relationship-parity-imposed sports/racing games (FIFA and NFS) than this one. "Cherry picking when it's possible strategy" detected. They couldn't avoid BF4, COD or AC4 but they could at least "forget" NBA 2K14 and its great MSAA Anti-aliasing on PS4 (maybe better performance too, who knows).