Research: Gaming - How has it evolved? Continued

I have looked at how games started very basic animations and inputs, and how narratively they were very innocent.
But we know that over time they have progressively become more complex and graphically detailed.

Mario 64, 1996 Nintendo 64

On the previous post are images of the first appearances of Mario and the latest. This image is from 'Super Mario 64' on the Nintendo 64 (named so due to its 64-bit graphical capability). We can see even with cartoon-like graphical styles such as Mario, advances in technology have vastly opened up new possibilities.
But what about games that are supposed to look 'real?'

Tomb Raider, 1996, PlayStation

Tomb Raider: Underworld, 2008, Multiple-Platform

I've looked at the 'Tomb Raider' series as an example, as I have played the majority of them.

I remember playing the first 'Tomb Raider' game on my PlayStation and thinking the physics and the graphics were amazing. When we compare that to what we have now, it doesn't look very pretty. 'Tomb Raider: Underworld' is the latest of the 'Tomb Raider' games released to date (not including spin-offs). We can see in this image the textures are of much higher standard.

One reason we now have access to hold so much texture in a game is due to the media it is stored on.

'Super Mario Bros.' was stored on a cartridge. These cartridges could hold about 8mbit of information. That means the coding, graphics, everything had fit on 8mbit of hardware. This increased in advancements in consoles such as the Nintendo 64, but was still a fairly low amount of data.

When CD-ROM was used as a storage media in the likes on the PlayStation, the size of data available upgraded to about 600MB, around half a Gigabyte. Although this was much more space available, the results of the space are seen in the 'Tomb Raider' image above.

DVD-ROM was introduced in next-gen consoles such as the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. This gave game developers 4.7GB to play with, 8 times as much data as was previously available.

DVD-ROM evolved to dual-layer allowing double the data (8.5-8.7GB) which is currently being used in the Xbox360.

Blu-Ray Disc is only used in the PlayStation 3 (in the games industry), and is most commonly used to hold high-definition films. This does give an advantage to the graphics capabilities of PS3 games, allowing a huge 25GB of data to play with. However, most games are released and multi-platform, and rather than create graphics packages for each console, games developers tend to create one and allow the consoles graphics capabilities to power the visuals,meaning most games look very similar on each console. The exception is games created exclusively for the PS3, then you get graphics like this:

Uncharted 3, 2011 PlayStation 3