Would you be fine with 480p if that makes real time ray tracing possible?
It's a trade off between level of detail and the resolution to be able to show it. You can have long draw distance with high detail objects, yet if that gets lost in upscaling fuzziness than what's the point. Too high res can also diminish the 'realness' factor. Last gen's remasters certainly run well, but you can also easily spot all the low detail model and building meshes. Also this gen, Infamous SS was a bit of a mixed bag to me. The foreground looks very nicely detailed yet the background is always out of focus, I guess to hide the lod transitions. The feeling that the fore and background don't quite fit never went away.
I do prefer not having any upscaling fuzziness though. Better have some things sharp than none at all.

If it is 900 60fps then yes. People caring  too much about the 1080p instead of 60fps.

PS4/XB1/WiiU/(OUYA) are affordable gaming console, they're not hi-tech cutting-edge systems. 60fps should be the standard instead of 1080p, lot of Wii U games are 720p only but people love it, why ? Because it's on 60fps. In 60fps, the games looks smoother, play better and it just make the games looks GOOD! even if the game fps dropped, you wouldnt noticed at all.

60FPS! Nation!

A very long time ago consoles where pretty different and relied on custom chips>not as versatile as PC hardware back then but could achieve things a PC couldn't or only a ten times more expensive PC could.

With PC-HW getting more and more features like 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration, more and more capabilities like HW-T&L, shaders... that slowly vanished, though fast hardware stayed expensive.

About consoles price and power:

360 and PS3 where massively subsidized, one reason of the long time losses MS and Sony made. Ad the RoD to that, cost tons of money again.

More power also means more heat and energy consumption, likely a bigger console and/or louder fan.

Let's look at the PS4, it's smaller, more powerful at least GPU-wise so:

2x GPU power would roughly mean 2x the power consumption if you're going for shaderunits. If you're going for clock speed it's even worse. Then you need a more powerful CPU to actually feed that GPU and because putting more and more cores into a CPU doesn't make that much sense it possibly would be about clock speed at least to some degree.

So our console gets way more energy hungry>cooling gets bigger/more expensive and possibly louder, console gets bigger.

More die space for the APU needed>higher price per APU

Lower yield because of more failures per APU> higher price again

You need more memory bandwidth> wider bus and more expensive mainboard.

In the end  two times the power might make manufacturing more than two times expensive.

But games nowadays are already broken and it's more a rule than an exception that games have (sometimes) huge day 1 patches. And I think this trend will be there to stay and even to get worse.

The PC was always ahead of consoles, I was part of the "3D revolution".

As soon as 3dfx burst onto the scene with the 3dfx Voodoo... The PC was ahead starting in the mid 90's, especially with games that utilised the GLIDE API.
When the Voodoo 2 launched in the late 90's, we were able to have multiple graphics cards in a system. Aka. SLI which allowed PC gamers to run games at higher resolutions, even console ports like Final Fantasy 7 and 8 or Turok, with better texturing and filtering.

Before that... Whilst people were playing with 2D consoles... Aka. Before the Nintendo 64, Playstation or Saturn... PC was already enjoying full 3D textured graphics with games like Descent.

We also had Sound Blaster. We had *full* Audio, which was absolutely huge back then.

The PC was then the first platform to jump to TnL. Then Pixel Shaders. Then Unified Shaders.
Heck... We had Graphics cards capable of Tessellation back in the Direct X 8.1 days. - Aka. the Original Xbox/Playstation 2/Gamecube era.

The PC even had 1080P monitors in the mid 90's. 20 years before it's "almost" a standard on consoles. ;)

Turok PC vs Nintendo 64. (PC Has better graphics.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQEOv3t4tm0&fmt=18


Final Fantasy 8 PC vs Playstation 1. (PC Has better graphics.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWhTWBsQaVk

Quake PC vs Playstation 1. (PC has better graphics.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqLaGkiDcQ

Doom. PC vs SNES. (PC Has better graphics.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-jLUsWl9mY

I even remember seeing comparisons of Mechwarrior 2 running on a PC under GLIDE beating out the Sega Saturn version too.

Overall. PC has always had a technical edge.

like the witcher, bloodborne, metal gear solid, infamous second son, rocket league, driveclub, dragon age, farcry, dying light and a lot more. they all suck, have bad gameplay and little to no content. 

Now what? Always or since the 90's?

I've played on PC since the early 90's. Even older games.

PC benefited from 'cheap' storage to some degree, as did home computers back then. But 2D capabilities where well behind consoles for a long time.

3D wise, PC's could count on strong CPU's if those had an FPU back then. Until consoles like 3DO, Jaguar and Playstation released with 3D capabilities on par or better than PC's back then for a way lower price.

That changed to some degree when 3DFX released Voodoo cards and Glide and even more so with DirectX 6 and cards like the first TNT. Still, consoles like Dreamcast where cheap but strong while a decent gaming PC was expensive and lasted for two to three years.

All that has changed.

About those 1080p monitors, i remember CRT's like an incredibly expensive CAD monitor. At the same time 2D PC games usually had 640x480 - 800x600 and even with a fast rig you could be happy to get decent framerates with 1025x768 in 3D games.

Nope, PC didn't always have the cutting edge. As a gaming platform it was pretty shitty for almost a decade, with VGA and Soundblaster being the first game changers, one soundcard alone almost as expensive as a console though.

You can still get £700 sound cards. things are always relative in their time, the only thing with PC that has changed a lot is the building process. It's much easier now it's basically lego.

All gen 8 consoles are shit (except Vita) when it comes to performance. That happens when you use produce as computing components. So no, it doesn't matter that X1 or Wii U are 20 or 100% more shit than PS4. They're all still shit. And even PS4 can fuck right off with its 1080p if it's not able to give me some god damn stable framerates.

Gen 9 can't come soon enough.

To me the jump to next gen is valid when graphics during regular gameplay look the way they looked during in-engine cut sceens during the previous gen. Having said that, both Xbone and PS4 are valid next gen consoles.

Still, I've decided to move to PC gaming now (I've already selected the parts for my PC and right now I'm searching for best prices), but not because of better graphics, but a much wider array of gaming experience that a PC has to offer. I can't play RTS games on a console and it really bothers me. Almost all console games are shooters and I was raised on Red Alert and Starcraft, so I miss these kinds of games. I miss Starcraft 2, I miss Company of Heroes, I can't wait for Total War: Warhammer. I won't get these games on a console, while I'll get almost all shooters on PC, with better graphics and mods on top. I'll wait with the purchase of PS4/Xbone till I get a decent raise In the mean time, my backlog on PS3 and Vita is enough to satisfy the console experience itch

That's why I've decided to go PC now, while keeping an eye on what Nintendo is doing, cause they are doing stuff that PC doesn't offer.