Videos games are about to look a heck of a lot better.  A new technology gets rid of the concept of polygons and replaces them with atoms.  The end result, VERY realistic looking environments.  You can see a comparison video here which details the concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUuUvDSXk4
I have no idea how this impacts the performance of current generation video cards, which are so focused on pushing polygons.  It sounds like the demo was done using raw CPU.  I wonder if that gives a platform like the PS3 an advantage since it is just CPUs (or SPUs as they are called) and all general purpose.

In a recent interview with Kotaku, the spokesman for Euclideon (the company making this new Infinite Detail engine) seems to be implying how such an engine could work.  Rather than the current methodology of creating a scene and projecting the visible aspects onto the view (which is your monitor or TV), it goes the reverse direction.  For each pixel on the display, find the visible point of the scene.  This actually limits the work to the resolution of your display, and saves the work of rendering a whole polygon map and adjusting for scale/resolution/distance.

Link: http://kotaku.com/5827192/euclideon-creator-swears-infinite-detail-is-not-a-hoax