So, Doom3 was sort of a benchmark for how games would look from then on with normal mapping. Is Raytracing the newest benchmark? Were there any in-between?

[Chicano3000 119]

Atari was just the first time graphics were seen on your TV, then NES introduced side scrolling(I guess), then SNES was Mode7, Genesis was just fast graphics,  Playstation/Saturn/64 were the first true 3D consoles, PS2 was fully modeled characters, XBox had bump mapping(Game Cube was a mix of both?). Meanwhile PC had Doom3 which displayed graphics that were ahead of their time.

 

So it seems like Raytracing is  the newest benchmark. But not sure if I missed anything. What about the future?

 

IMO, physics is probably the  the next big  leap. I remember Half Life 2 being big on physics. 

[Voidler 1,675]

Nanite and similar high geometry technologies are the next benchmark- see UE5 demo