I do agree with your compelling argument about top quality 1080p vs 4k. Polycount, lighting, and physics calculations would theoretically surpass 4k resolution at 1080p and for a FAR cheaper price. Potentially by a significant margin. That being said 4k resolution will be more pleasing to the eye and it will create an illusion of vastly improved texture quality that would blow the former out of the waters. I think one of the big three are going to push hard into 4k territory. I never claimed that it would be native 4k, but rather marketed as 4k with an upscale in the same sense last gen did with 1080p. This will be far easier to do in my opinion than it was with 1080p because more and more smart TV's are using a killer upscale tech. My old 1080i 68" tv from 2003 did a beautiful job of this. Games looked better on that TV than most 46" TV's with native 1080p and I have done side by side comparisons. The PS4 looks half decent when upscaled on a 4k TV. However the jaggies and quality of the edges of most objects look poor beyond all reasoning. Hence I would recommend a 1080p screen for these consoles unless your true motive is to flop your e-peen around. 4k movies look great, but most of them are not truly native at this time. Infact I believe none of them have been filmed in 4k resolution so in theory there is no TRUE 4k movie on the market. Companies are flopping the 4k logo around to sell more TV's. Sony is incredibly guilty of this act. Films will be true 4k before games are and I expect we will see more native 4k movies within the next couple of years.

Oh ya, give Pavolink all the credit when I've used the term "family of devices" 100 times by now

Whatever happened to those rumors of a "free-form screen" that Sharp was working on for Nintendo? Could that be for the NX?

Personally given the timing and the current climate of the Japanese videogame market, I believe Nintendo would focus more on their handheld future rather then try to compete in the main console market with a system that would just drive up expense of development even more.

Maybe it is the hybrid everyone suspects, but short of the surprise announcement that the NX is a retooled Wii U expansion device/successor a la Sega CD/32X or even Nintendo's own Famicom Disc drive add on in Japan or the N64's 64DD, is probably going to be related to Nintendo's strongest foothold in the market they care the most about... Japan.

Handheld... the hybrid is something that I see leading to issues.

I think the NX will be a series of devices with similar architecture and the same OS, they'll also share most games maybe with some being exclusive to one of them. The devices could be a home console, a handheld and maybe a tablet or whatever they come up with.

I think it will be a handheld, but we'll have to wait until next year to find out what it is.

Just about any strategy could lead to potential problems. It's quite clear that Nintendo needs to shake things up since their current strategy isn't working and they are having a hard time supporting two distinct platforms at once.

:D

It's true, you have been using that expression for a while now.
I was reading some comments and his expression was actually very appropriate... aswell! ;)

In that case I agree. The resolutions next generation will be similar to the 7th generation. 720p/sub-hd upscaled to 1080p vs. 1080p/1440p/1600p upscaled to 4k and they'll be marketed as ultra-hd consoles. CPU's are mattering much less with each generation, so other than removing the bottleneck on GPU choice, I can't really see more CPU power translating into faster games in general (although there are specific exceptions.) The extra cores benefit multi-tasking more than anything else.  The next XB/PS should likely have cards capable of 8-12 Tflops if they want to maintain moderate power usage, medium form-factors, and cheap prices and they are to release in 2018/2019. We can generally predict how much power/energy usage GPU's will have and from there - their raw performance. Prices are more iffy, as they depend on other factors, but usually it is energy which is the limitation more than price (even though they are proportional.) 

Assuming more raw power being used in geometry (hinted by DX12's features) and other graphical features, it makes sense that they won't boost the image quality too much. Especially since the effects of increasing image quality are misicule relative to these other features. So yeah, 1600p rendered resolution, and maybe less with good AA should be what the next consoles will do. We should expect next-gen consoles to do stuff like SE's demo, but obviously to a lesser degree as they are using 4 Titans in the video, and demos always look better than in-game (8-12 Tflops vs. ~20 Tflops)

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/square-enix-on-dx12-it-took-around-three-weeks-to-get-the-basic-rendering-working-on-directx-12/