[london-boy]

Originally Posted by LunchBox

Oops! Sory for the fragmented post...

I meant real geometry on where the industry is headed.

Well it really depends. Today's top CGI obviously has more geometry than any game. But a wall will still be a flat surface. The tiny little grooves you might encounter in a wall will not be fully 3D for a long time if ever.
Shaders will rule our world for a long long long time, and we already have machines capable of calculating more polygons than they can show us.

Until it's cheaper to move a 2M polys model than it is to move a 100K one with normal maps that looks pretty much the same, we'll stick to faked geometry. The 100k model will become 200k in time, to a point where we can't distinguish the 2 versions of the model - could be 2M and 1M, don't know.

Displacment maps will help, like Parallax mapping is helping a lot too.