They are working on a new kind of texture format that reduces the size of the texture, so graphics like that could be possible with our current rigs.
From tweakguides.com
Procedural Textures
10 November 2006
Here is an interesting article on
Procedural Textures, a technology which may well be the future of how textures are generated and used in games. Essentially textures can look just as good if not better than they do now, but take up a fraction of the size and also become more dynamic throughout a game. To see some examples, check out this
screenshot gallery. Furthermore it turns out that the game RoboBlitz we discussed earlier uses procedural textures to reduce the full game to 350MB for PC, and only 50MB for XBox 360. This shows that there are companies out there working on innovative software-based solutions to improve gaming, not just hardware-based solutions which require us spending more money.