Originally Posted by The Bus

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I think more advances will come from physics and having some way to make the worlds much more interactive. Imagine if in GTA5 you could go into every single room within the city, rather than having an inviting facade for a building and a texture for a door for a place you can't enter. That to me, is more of a breakthrough than having better character models, although both will be improved. But this goes back to me talking about AAA games. Something like Elder Scrolls 5 or GTA 5 will use this. But it won't be necessary in every game.

Originally Posted by spainlinx0

That sounds cool, until you realize someone has to design all those rooms, so you will essentially have 50,000 rooms that look the same because no one is going to spend the time to do that.

Originally Posted by jdodd

I would love to see a system where you could control a little robot and have him pick stuff up and put stuff down -- gyroscopes, for example. I think that would be the wave of the future.

Originally Posted by The Bus

Draw distance is a good one but we've gotten pretty damn good so far. Games like Crackdown and Oblivion have very good draw distances. Oblivion is limited by hardware, but they had some pretty crazy outdoor scenes where you could see for the equivalent of in-game miles and everything actually looked far away. I'd have to say that, frame-rate / pop-in / bug issues aside, something like Oblivion running at a high frame-rate is good enough for me, just in the way the 2D graphics of Super Mario World or Last Blade 2 are good enough and both are over a decade old.

The big breakthrough is not going to come from better graphics. If you compare graphics from 2009 to 1999 to 1989, I would argue there's a bigger difference from 1989 to 1999 than from 1999 to 2009.

I think more advances will come from physics and having some way to make the worlds much more interactive. Imagine if in GTA5 you could go into every single room within the city, rather than having an inviting facade for a building and a texture for a door for a place you can't enter. That to me, is more of a breakthrough than having better character models, although both will be improved. But this goes back to me talking about AAA games. Something like Elder Scrolls 5 or GTA 5 will use this. But it won't be necessary in every game.

Originally Posted by Michael Corvin

The cost of that future? 1200 points:

http://img108.imageshack.us/img108/1...boblitzaa7.jpg

Then there's always this:
http://www.nikkoamerica.com/nhe/dvd_...tor_video.html

Originally Posted by XavierMike

Or this..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJAIk2nAwG0

Originally Posted by Breakfast with Girls

There's plenty left to do. Processing power and physics cards are where you'll see the most benefit. Down the road memristors will enable games to load instantly once they're installed onto the system.

A couple things you didn't mention:

- Draw distance
- On-the-fly model creation (entire cities, for example)
- Frame rate and resolution
- Physics (OK, you mentioned this, but there are huge strides that could be made here)
- Model detail
- etc.

Of course, the industry as a whole continues to specialize in terms of graphics. GTA X will be a completely realistic environment, probably some sort of VR—but Mario Kart 9 isn't going to look dramatically different (in terms of realism) from where it is now.

Originally Posted by mr.snowmizer

I'll always remember overhearing the owner of the local mall-based videogame store, circa 1982, after returning from some trade show, 'Why would the Japanese enter the market? It can't get any better than this'.