When I said about making game realistic, I didn't mean as real as REAL.
AFAIK, with the knowledge we have right now, we can make games almost realistic as the real life.
Think about a scenario where a helicopter is going to land on dusty terrain, and the winds from the heli-propeller should make a big cloud of dust. You have to use particles for that. You can create the scene with a million particles. But it might look realistic enough. But the current hardware cannot handle anything higher. When the new hardware reaches the market, they see that now the hardware is capable of delivering a good performance at 10 million particles. So they use 10 million particles for such a scene in their next game. If you can't buy hardware, play the old one. If you can buy new hardware, you're welcome to play the new game. As simple as that. I think now the game developers are generous than before because they have a lot of options that you can turn off, if you want to play the new games on old hardware too.
You know, the increase in RAM requirements for the latest games is happening slowly that the processor requirement. None of the games out there requires more than 768MB RAM (system RAM - not just for the games). Not even more than 512MB.
BTW, why do you think there were random pause in NFSMW? Well, I didn't get any. Not even on my old PC.
