Why Can't Next Gen Consoles Do HD?

Yes they are!

Hope this helps

The_Freeman

when you compare ps3 and xbox 360 first year games you can see consols need more time to reach their top , i can say these consols will do MUCH MORE better in future ,
xbox and ps3 in specs have only 512mb ram , but their performance is far better than pcs with 2gb ram or even more ! about ps4 and xbox one is the same

They're mostly selling on hype, tbh.

The 8-core CPUs they're using are meant for tablets and tiny netbooks, and really get outperformed by even a Pentium G3258.
The 'graphics cards' the consoles use are also just APUs.

I've mostly been testing Warframe because I don't have a lot of multi-platform games, but at least in Warframe my rig (specs in signature) is ahead of the PS4. Higher framerates at ultra settings with PhysX enabled. And the X1 is weaker still.

And a PC comparable to mine in raw performance only has to to cost $600-$700. Not bad, when you consider that practically anyone who has a console for gaming would need a PC for the internet and general use anyway. It actually seems cheaper to build a gaming PC, rather than get a gaming console + XBL/PSplus subscription + general use PC.

Of course, the PS4 and X1 are still big upgrades over the PS3/360, but... There's a reason why all these console exclusives that are supposed to be selling the systems keep flopping or getting delayed. Developers are culling graphics, backpedaling, delaying releases for optimization, and still getting sub-par performance and worse graphics. The next-gen systems aren't nearly as strong as they were expected to be, and developers must be frantic about it.

Ryse got graphically downgraded and got trashed in the reviews.
Killzone Shadow Fall runs at 1080p/30 fps in single player or 720p/60 fps in multiplayer, and doesn't look nearly as good as the pre-launch footage.
Order 1886 is looking worse by the day, and they already cut it to 30 fps.
Watchdogs is at 900p/30 fps on the PS4, and still not quite at ultra settings.
Titanfall on the X1 runs at a paltry 792p, as low as some PS3 games.
Warframe on the PS4 is aiming for 1080p/60 fps, but they had to disable the particles and they still drop to ~25 fps at times.
Deep Down gets more graphically downgraded every time they show a video, to the point where people suspect the earliest footage was actually running on a PC.

And in the years to come, we can only expect framerates and resolutions to fall lower and lower. At launch, the PS3 even was a minimum of 720p/30 fps. A few games even hit 720p/60 fps or 1080p/30 fps. By the end of the PS3's life cycle, games were usually at 500p/unstable 30 fps, low settings.

By the time the PS4 is older in 5-6 years, will it be running games at 720p/30fps, low-medium settings? Probably.
I'd expect that lifespan out of a PC with no upgrades, really.

Ps4 indeed has a something like a hd7850 (they have more or less the same number in shaders), but is a crippled version, so it doesn't have the same raw power than a desktop hd7850, now, you wonder, how a crippled hd7850 can run those games at that resolution at 60fps? thats the magic of console optimization, consoles dont have the driver layer, because there is only one gpu.

In the long run, you can get a good gaming pc for something like $500-600, which you can easily upgrade when you need it.

I think the biggest problem is they are using a "Jaguar" APU. The jaguar is a tablet apu lol.