We will see games within the next 10 - 20 years needing 1TB of RAM, and some
developers (me?
) will come around saying it's not enough, perhaps two or
three would be better.
One of the problem is that memory consumption isn't a linear function of the
problem size. For images it's an n² grow (width x height). For volumes it's
already n³. In one of those expected futures we will see some games where
almost all the objects or surroundings are (physical) volumes. Just doubling
their resolution, (2n)³, yields 8n³. So one would need an 8x increase in
memory just for doubling the resolution. Hence, in the future we will see a
much faster memory consumption as we have today. Techniques like adaptive
refinement (within a 3d material volume) will become key algorithms to counter
act this rapid increase in memory consumption.
So with each next-gen, the memory available is eaten away faster, since the
problem size doesn't stay the same. That's perhaps the observation made by
Mr. Blow.