"The thing that separates consoles from FarmVille is the fact that consoles define the high-end gaming experience," he told Gamasutra. "When you look for the best graphics available in the whole game industry today, you look at Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and those games are the best out there, bar none.
"And so the big opportunities for future consoles is to bring that to an entirely new level by delivering a dramatic increase in raw computing power."
He continued: "We measure that in floating-point operations per second, and now we talk about teraflops - trillions of floating-point operations per second. What we want is as many teraflops as is economically possible to deliver to consumers, because that enables us to create the best quality experience as possible, and that will drive people to buy a new machine."
And Sweeney believes persuading the millions of PS3 and Xbox 360 owners to purchase expensive new hardware is the "big challenge" for Microsoft and Sony.
"To do that you need awesome games that provide a level of graphical fidelity that people have just not seen or even imagined previously," he said.