4K will die as soon as it appears. It's just another thing the TV industry wants us to want like 3D so we don't buy a new TV every ten to fifteen years like we used to but instead every five years. The problem is content. TV channels are even opting for 720pm or 1080i because it is much cheaper for them than to broadcast a full 1080p signal. Bandwidth is the problem here. And they sure as hell won't upgrade all their cameras to 4K after having just upgraded to HD. It's not like they can afford to buy new hardware every couple of years. We're talking about billions of investments here.
And comparing the resolution of a PC screen with a viewing distance of maybe half a meter to that of a TV with a viewing distance of four meters is just silly. People still buy DVDs because they don't see as big a difference between those and BDs for the asking price and you think they will switch to 4K in five years? LOL.
Full 1080p support alone would need almost 2x more power than a 360 has to offer. Meaning if the next gen system is 10x more powerful than a 360 it will only look 5x more powerful (graphical detail) when running at 1080p. Make that 2x more powerful when running at 1080p/60 fps. Now as a publisher, would you expect your customers to rather buy a game that looks 2x better than current titles or 10x better than current titles? Right, and that's why we will see a lot of games next gen running natively at 720p/30 fps. There's another reason: A lot of money these days is spent on creating high poly models and then turning them into lower poly models with normal maps to actually make them useable. To get development costs down you have to get rid of those extra steps and try to make just one model and use it ingame. This doesn't just cut the time and money spent on an ingame model in half, it's less than that (because it takes more time to create a low poly model looking as good as the high poly version than it takes to create the high poly version). That's where people are so wrong about diminishing returns. Next gen development will actually be cheaper - unless you put all that extra processing power into higher resolutions.
See what Turn 10 does. They create those 1 million poly models of cars and use them in the showroom? Why? Because they will use those models as ingame models in the next gen Forza games. And production of those models is much easier. With 1 million polygons even laserscanning becomes an option. That is not possible today for those 50k polygon models in Forza 4 and GT5 because the scanner doesn't know how to optimize.
Well that's many argument you have there.
I'm inclined to say that 4K won't be useful to many, but on large screen, it isn't tricky at all to see the difference with 1080p. Also, 4k vs 1080p isn't debatable, it is plain better.
Stereoscopic 3D on the other hand, doesn't please many people, including me.
I don't think switching to 4K for the industry would be impossible. 4K(and more) cameras have been there for a long time, and are even already used. Digital projectors in cinema are already either 2K or 4K. Blur ray can contain 4K movies, and HDMI 1.4 already support 4K too.
Games can be rendered at variable res, so there is no issue there for PC (console of course, will never go 4K due to performance).
Finally, television, well you are correct, but bandwidth increase over years so we'll see how far they'll go.
So honestly, I'm convinced 4K will be the last resolution increase for consumer level devices, but I don't think 1080p is the last step.
Console performances isn't measurable or comparable with such simple numbers.Running your game in 1080p doesn't mean you can't go over a certain polygon budget, everything is more subtle than that.
1080p will certainly be the industry standard because it won't be as hard to achieve as on current gen. Plus it helps getting rid of visual artifacts like aliasing.
Normal maps are mostly generated from texture, because it's far less time consuming. You don't model every rock with million of polygons. When creating a high poly model is really necessary (characters are a notable case), we are talking about millions of micropolygons. This won't be rendered as is even on next gen, because there is no point doing this unless you want to consume all your performance on a single character. Things like normal/height map doesn't take much time to derive from high poly. The hard work is to make this high polygon model.
I doubt next gen dev will be cheaper, many things will be done quicker but raw content will have to be far more detailed and technology can't do everything for you.
@dragonelite, tearing and temporal aliasing are issues we can get rid of at 30FPS. I would love 60fps as standard, 30fps pisses me off and I rarely play on console nowadays. But people simply don't care...But I have to admit that motion blur is getting more mature, that will help.
