Is that the barometer?

You guys.... some of you who are looking forward to next gen primarily for the graphics sure do your best to avoid watching, talking about or reading about next gen graphics.

This week I posted a couple of videos, a next gen lighting engine said to be running on a machine comparable to PS4 specs. And a video from Nvidia on their next gen face rendering tech. Skip to about 8 minutes to see the video. Considering it requires 2 teraflops (more power than the PS4) just for THE FACE it seems pretty infeasible for anything other than their high end PC GPU which is like 4.6 teraflops.

What struck me about the lighting engine environment video was that it featured an Unreal Engine 4 demo like environment. The detail was great and it was obviously a bump over what our current consoles could do. Yet after probably less than 20 seconds my wide eyed optimism was tempered and I was left with the feeling that it looked good, but similar to what we already have, but a bit better. Now we keep seeing technology from developers about recreating human like characters in games. The video I have linked above is the latest, then we had PS4's Old man video and Square Enix Luminous engine demo whose most impressive thing was the old geezers face. Kojima trying to wow us with Ground Zero's and Fox Engine, PES trying to do the same.

So is that how we are going to ultimately judge next generation graphics? On how well it can recreate the human face and emotional responses? From what I have seen extensive mo-cap has to be used and that makes the biggest difference, the animation of the characters. Nvidia's tech needs 132 cameras that captures mocap data which is 30gb larger than will fit onto a Bluray - their breakthrough was compressing it to 300mb. This week we also got new screens of Quantic Dreams' Beyond game. And it already does the realistic animation and facial pores up close thing.

So next gen, is it all about the faces?