Former Naughty Dog developer and Filmic Worlds' founder, John Hable, in interview with GamingBolt, he talks about the capabilities of current gen consoles and shares his thoughts on when we are going to see real-time graphics that rival CG movies.

Hable begins by explaining that current gen consoles are much better than the previous generation.

“Honestly, it is hard to say. I think it will be a very long time. The current crop of consoles is much better than the previous generation, but the trailers are getting better too,” Hable said to GamingBolt. “If you really want to hit that level of quality then you need staggering triangle counts with really long shaders. Photoreal global illumination is very easy offline but very difficult in realtime.”

It Will Take Another 2 Console Generations for CG Quality Visuals

He continues that it will take another two console cycles before 4K VG level visual could be possible.

“I don’t have a good answer for you, but my guess would be longer than you think. One more console generation seems too quick. Maybe in two more generations? That would be PS6 and the 5th gen Xbox? And if we need to render in 4k then add another generation which puts us at PS7 and 6th gen Xbox. It’ll be a while.”

Hable concludes that trailers and movies usually have much larger budgets than games.

“Of course, they will never fully line up because of the content costs. Trailers and feature-length movies simply have a much higher budget per second than what the full game can afford. This difference is more than an order of magnitude in some cases.”

While this holds true in most cases, some AAA games do have some insanely large budgets that could most certainly allow the production values of a blockbuster movie.

Regardless though, it's understandable that consoles would need much more raw power than is currently available to produce CG quality visuals. Cost will always be a deciding factor in the development of a console, therefore cutting edge technology is available only for the PC market.