I think the same financial prudence would have yielded massively more powerful consoles CPU wise by later this year or into next year. Jaguar is terrible.

28nm took too long to get replaced, and 2013 was the tail end. Sadly it's not like Intel+Nvidia was affordable enough to use in consoles, but AMD will soon have moved from awful CPU performance in that TDP to above-average.

Well, for starters, both the PS3 and the X360 would've probably beat the Wii. And last gen would've been sooooo long, sheesh.

Fair enough, but if they'd come out in 2015 they'd still be midrange, just by 2015 standards instead of 2013. At this point I guess you can either hope this gen isn't as drawn out as the last, (I imagine PS4/Xbone will be looking a tad dated by 2020/2021) or go PC master race. ;)

yeah that's kind of my point. Not that PS4/X1 would have been higher up the totem pole of the timeframe against midrange PCs or anything like that, but rather that the long stagnation period from ~'09-'13 was really rough CPU wise.

I mean a Phenom II X6 is roughly on par with the FX6350 performance-wise. And even on Intel's side, someone with a 2500k doesn't see massive gains going to a 4690K Devil's Canyon. But above all, GF/TSMC long-toothed 28nm and the TDP targets by the console makers made something akin to the Jaguar inevitable at that die size. What they managed to do with 28nm is admirable I think, but man, when you consider the cross-gen games dominating these past couple of years, and seeing 'exclusives' that could have been easily done on gen7 with lower res/detail (graphics don't matter at all, amirite? we should go back to 2600!), I think waiting for the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG awaited die-shrink would have done everyone a lot of good. All the same games we've played in 2013, 2014, and into 2015 would have been there, just less 'pretty'. And the generational jump would have been incredible rather than merely okay.

TBH the current consoles should have been released in 2011. With similar/same specs they have right now.  So new better hardware would be right around the corner coming 2016 or something.

Crysis 1 PC edition was the best looking game (not talking about effects hiding blocky world geometry here) until I dunno Killzone Shadowfall took the crown
(maybe it did not but at least it was the first game that could kinda compete with Crysis. (again NOT talking about shaders because modern shaders/effects simply didnt exist in 2007 games like Crysis 2 or Battlefield 3 look much worse than Crysis 1)

WiiU should have been a 2009/10 console


We wasted a whole generation..... :(

These, plus CoD and Fifa were basically the ones that saved the year. Most new IPs failed hard. Just check the poor releases, it was a slaughter.

A lot of games look better than Crysis 1. Just to start, Crysis 2 and 3 and Metro Last Light. Killzone SF is way, way ahead of Crysis 1. Crysis 2 is substantialy ahead of C1 and C3 is a bit better than C3, that's on a similar level to Metro LL and SF.

Then we'd have almost no PS4 and Xbox One exclusives until 2017.

Ive been saying this since they both released with missing shit from the previous generation. You could tell they both were rushed

May I disagree with that assumption? Crysis did a splendid job, specially for an open world game that was limited to DirectX 9 shaders. Crysis 2 managed to improve performance mostly on the grounds it rendered fairly small areas limited by blocky architecture and object physics was mostly static and pre-set.

As to which looks better, well, they don't even take place on the same enviroments, do they.

OT - yes, they could. Releasing in the middle of the 28nm stall, specially opting for power-hungry AMD hardware, was never the best idea to begin with.