Xbox and PS2 games look like PC did years before their release, and even newer TV's just aren't capapble of delivering a picture as nice as those screen caps show becuase you're looking at them on a moniter. Those unreal 3 engine graphics look unbeleiable, and I mean that I don't beleive they can do it on any PC. Nobodys computer will run that for a long time and any machine that will be able to will cost a shitload of money. Next Gen indeed cause only our kids will see these graphics...
High definition TVs have more pixels per square inch than your computer monitor does. One of the high-definition picture formats is composed of 1080 active lines, and each line is composed of 1920 active pixels. Therefore, each frame has over 2 million (1080x1920=2,073,600) color pixels creating the image. Today's typical analog television is roughly equivalent to 480 active lines, with each line holding about 440 pixels. So, each frame has a little over 200,000 color pixels in use creating the image compared with the 2 million.
The monitor on the other hand, depending on what you bought can support much above the 2 million PPI(pixels per inch). However, hardly any games require anything near 1600x1200=1,920,000 because most monitors can't handle it.
While it's true that most people will have to update their computers to run the new engine, a lot of people's cpus will still be fast enough to. Right now I have an 128 MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with a 3gHz processor and 1GB or ram. I guarentee I'd be able to run anything they can throw at me if I feed my cpu another gig of RAM. If you've ever run Everquest 2 or Lineage 2 even, at max resolution with the graphics at max it looks similar to the new engine. Not quite there, but similar. While my graphics card will cut it for now, 512MB graphics cards are just now starting to hit the market.
