Yeah, along with enormous generational leaps in hardware quality, come similar games that leave a real mark on the history of games overall.

PS3/360 were expensive at first, but they came down in price over time. And 360's reliability problems weren't the inevitable result of its power.

Sure, in retrospect if they'd been weaker but cheaper MS/Sony may have made more money, but then we wouldn't have gotten games as jaw-dropping as we did last gen, not just in terms of graphics, but also in terms of other aspects made possible by more power, like physics, world scope and complexity, AI, etc.

I guess it depends on what your "goal" is in console gaming. Do you like buying a new console becuase of the higher res and enhanced visual effects, or do you buy one because of the new possibilities it allows in terms of game design and gameplay? Some people only care about gameplay, some care some about everything, and some just want eye candy. The more the industry focuses on the performance levels of the consoles, in terms of Flops, the quicker they will reach saturation, leading to no choice but to focus on improving on everything else, but Flops.

I would say this is a bad idea in general. Dedicated gamers probably won't mind as much, and will just be happy they were given more eye candy sooner than later. Casuals however, who are the majority of the console market, look at the marketing numbers and visuals mostly, and when they start to see the Flops aren't getting much higher, along with the visuals only improving slightly, they will find it harder to want to purchase a new console. This will make price even more important because that will be the main draw for casuals in a case like that. As long as the new console is cheap enough, they should still buy it. Either that, or you have to drag the gen out long enough that people are simply ready for something new. I think this is another one of the many reasons why PS4 is selling so fast, because normal gens are typically 6 years max, but last gen lasted 7. Time for something new, regardless.

It's a lot like iPhones. The hardcore Apple fans buy them up everytime a new one is available, just because, but the casuals who buy iphones tend to wait years before upgrading. This is mostly because the new yearly improvements don't make that much of a difference to those casuals, as well as the prices being way to high. Being able to say something like, this new phone is 4X as powerful as the last one, is a much easier sell than having to say, well this years phone is pretty much the same performance, but we removed a few buttons and replaced them with a slightly larger screen.

PS3 and 360 were what they were, and that's ok, but how it effects the industry going forward is my concern. With mid gen upgrades, and potentially longer gens because of that, this "problem" looks to be mostly under control with a new generational progression format. How people will continue to respond going forward, remains to be seen.

Here's what I think we would be getting.... and all of these would be on a 7nm/10nm node.

- 8 core ryzen 7 equivalent CPU@3.0ghz
- 72 - 80CU GPU@1.2Ghz+ capable of about 12TF+ (PS4 is 18CU and PS4pro is 36CU) 
- PCIe M.2 based SSD 2000MB/s+ transfer speeds and probbaly only 1TB of it, maybe even less.
- 16GB of at least HBM2 or higher allowing memory bandwith in excess of 500GB/s
- 4GB of LPDDR4 ram reserved for the OS. 

And I believe they will target a $399 price point. As for releasing two models simultaneously..... that would just be a disastrous mistake. As weird as it may seem, and that situation the more expensive more powerful SKU will always be considere as the primary model. The reason that isn't the case with the PS4pro is because by the time it released there were already over 40M base PS4s in the market.

Well PS3 was $500 and $600. XB360 was $300 and $400. For 2005/2006, PS3 was expensive, but 360 was affordable. The prices did come down reasonably fast, but because of things like PS3 removing BC. Your right, 360's performance wasn't the sole reason for the red ring, but it was part of the entire XB vs PS battle royal that was about to begin. The fact that MS decided to create the 360 themselves for the first time, and get it out well ahead of the PS3, was a mistake. They should have either delayed the launch, tweaked and backed off the performance a bit, or relied more on third party engineering.

I agree the games would have been worse than they were, but how much better than 6th gen is good enough? If we would have had PS3 (and 360) around 125Gflops, that still would have been a 21X improvement over the PS2, and it still would have been more than enough to satisfy everyone. Looking back, sure, nobody wants to assume having something worse would have been better, but that sometimes can be the case, in terms of the bigger picture.

I for one don't care all that much that the jump from PS3 to PS4 wasn't as large in terms of Flops. My worry is that over time, as the improvements become less and less, selling new consoles to casuals will become much harder. Mid gen upgrades helps this situation for now. For all we know, PS wants hardware upgrades to become a lesser yearly/bi-yearly thing, so they can focus on online and digital services instead of physical hardware. I know they have said thats not the case and that gens aren't going away, but console marketing, especially as of late, says a lot that is only partially true, or flat out false.

If you halved PS3 and 360's power, then games wouldn't just be graphically worse, they'd also be reduced in terms of physics, world size, characters on screen, AI, things that have an impact on gameplay. And sure, maybe we wouldn't know better if that's how it happened, but given the known quantity of what we did get, I wouldn't change it.

Reaching the point of diminishing returns in graphics was always going to happen eventually, trying to postpone it would be only putting off the inevitable. While I will miss the days of mind-blowing visual leaps, there is still room to grow in other ways; a new wave of hardware with strong CPUs for example could bring a generational leap in the complexity of game worlds and simulation, which could in itself be as exciting as any graphical jump.

Don't kid yourself :)

I'm not going to comment on the specs, because I'm really not so sure at the moment. Too many possiblities now that mid gen upgrades are a thing as well as the multiple choices for tech going forward, along with the shortages of some of that tech.

As for the two tiers at launch being a disaster, I don't see that being the case, as long as they don't go overboard like they did with the PS3. If they followed a more affordable path, like the $300 and $400 consoles that 360 had in 2005, then it should work. This would mean having something like a $349/$399 base PS5, along with a $499 PS5 Pro around 2020. The Pro doesn't have to be all that much better to get the hardcore spec heads, or wealthy to buy it, no matter when it launches, and as long as the gap between both isn't too large, then people will be fine with picking up the base PS5 model. Just look at the performance gap between PS4 and PS4 Pro, yet the Pro sales are quite good for showing up mid gen. I honestly can't believe that if PS4 Pro was launched at the same time as PS4, for $499 or even $549, that some people wouldn't have bought it. I would have to assume, that in that scenario, PS4 Pro would have higher sales than it does now, and worst case, PS4 as a whole, would still have 60+ million consoles sold regardless. (PS4 Pro would need to have focused more on enhanced 1080p early on, then add in 4k and checkerboarding a few years down the road, like late 2016).

This could lead to a shorter gen though, or just another mid gen upgrade on top of the PS5 Pro at launch, and that may defeat the purpose of what PS is trying to do. It's hard to know what exactly their game plan is going forward.

Correct. Games would have been worse all around, and some of the masterpieces that came out later in the gen, may never have happened, or may have happend but were considered just ok, or would have had to wait until the jump to next gen. I mean, imagine The Last Of Us as a launch title for PS4, and how that would have effected this gen...

Saturation is something that's tough to fight off. Good business practices really help though. All depends on what the goals of that business are for itself and the industry. The industry will have to branch out, your right, which we're already seeing with VR. PSVR for example, is not just a gimmick, its PS planning for the future when Flops aren't as reliable as a sales tool anymore.

A PS5 with a great CPU and decent GPU would be just fine with me. The overall graphical leap from PS3 to PS4 wasn't all that impressive to me, which was ok because PS3 was quite impressive itself. PS4 just adds some highlights to that. If PS5 can add some polish to what PS4 offers, it should do just fine, as long as they take real advantage of that CPU. 60fps, please?

Not as different as you think: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6
http://silverspaceship.com/src/svt/
Partially Resident Textures is a superset.

I think it's safe to say that Megatexturting, Virtual Texturing, Tiled Resources, Partially Resident Textures, Sparse Virtual Textures and so on... Are all essentially the same concept.

I haven't read this.
Still. It doesn't seem to be a big issue for iD Tech 5 and 6.

It basically is. It's a theoretical ceiling.
Plus rendering a game needs more than just floating point.  - Which is why a GPU with less flops can outperform a GPU with more flops.