A game that when I look at it, I find it hard to believe that it's a video game running in real time. That sense I got from the likes of Rogue Squadron II or Gears of War 1 that I'm looking at something leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've ever seen.

What about Uncharted 4 

I really appreciate this, but I am completely bothered by the walk and don't walk symbols both being lit at the same time.

It looks beautiful for sure, but it doesn't blow me away like Uncharted 2 did in 2009.

Battlefront comes very, very close, the closest of any game I've seen thus far.

So what you want is real time graphics that's hardly discernible in comparison to pre-rendered movies ? Or do you want real time graphics of the current generation to deliver or surpass last generation pre-rendered custscenes ? (We can already do that.)

The first time I saw Rogue Squadron II running on Gamecube and Gears of War 1 running on Xbox 360, I felt like "holy shit, how the fuck is this even a video game, it looks too good to be a video game". The last time I got that feeling was back in 2009 when I saw Uncharted 2 running on PS3. I want to feel that way again, to look at a game and have my jaw drop and my brain question how it's even possible for a game to look so good.

It looks like the only way you'll be impressed is if we move next to the final piece of computer graphics and that's ray tracing! 

You often don't see thick objects like the above in games that would exhibit any sort of transmittance but ray tracing gives you nice soft shadows, refraction, transparency, and coloured transmittance! 

With ray tracing you get high quality indirect reflections and all sorts of surfaces get arbitrarily sampled so you get even higher quality material rendering like the above!

Ray tracing is practically bulletproof in terms of accuracy for all sorts of materials and it allows for multi-bounce lighting too!

Ray tracing gives smoke some real depth too! (multiple scattering!)

Spectral rendering and caustics thanks to ray tracing! 

The point I'm trying to make is ray tracing can handle a lot of these corner cases that you often wouldn't find while offering multi-bounce global illumination!

That's looking really great! But I've always been drawn to a more stylized... style. That will be cool in some games, but in others I'd really like to see some more vivid colors and whatnot. Another possibility is to have realistic visuals with a bit of stylization going on, kinda like in Far Cry - I thought Far Cry 3 looked great and had a nice visual to it.

But what I'd really like to see in next gen games are improved AI! I'm fine with the graphics that we already have, now go work on that AI! There are so many more possibilities with improved HW, other than better graphics, more interesting things imo.

Well. If you compare the early Xbox 360 games to the early Xbox One games... The difference is absolutely stupid.

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher bay.


For instance on the 360 launch games like Pefect Dark Zero were pretty ugly and not much of an improvement over the original Xbox.


And then towards the end of the generation we got:


But then if you compare Battlefield 3 to say... Hardline or Battlefield 4 or what-not on the Xbox One, the difference is relatively neglible all things considered.




It wasn't untill around 2007 with Halo 3 did the Xbox 360 truly start to stretch it's legs, it had Tessellation on the water, triple buffering, HDR lighting... Lots of framebuffer effects. It was a power house.
Reach then threw away the Tessellation, triple buffering and HDR lighting, introduced texture streaming and impostering and bolstered image quality elsewhere substantually.
Halo 4 then took things to the extreme with static baked and precalculated everything, which they took note from Uncharted.

I think the end of this year/early next year we will likely reach the point where we start to see games truly shine on the current hardware... The transition is taking longer than normal because there are 10's of millions of gamers that took awhile to transition to newer hardware.

Same.

Some PS4 games announced this year are really beautiful, but I'm still waiting for the "ultra-realistic future".