Ha, 20 years. I'd guess more around 100, and graphics card companies, unless they pivot, won't really be a part of it. If we're talking about true VR, it's the replacement of reality, e.g. piping experience directly into your neurons. For instance, how are we going to augment smell or touch with a headset and a video card?
Sensory augmentation will probably start with dream augmenting tech (headsets that are able to give you "good" dreams by learning your neural firing patterns), then as delivery systems, nanotech, processing and brain knowledge gets better, we'll see it evolve into waking experience augmentation.
OK, yes, that is the ultimate vr destination, but like bradhe said, thats not what anyone's talking about. Like you said, that's more like 100 years off (I think its a lot more before the tech is really all there AND people are OK with the seriously invasive surgury that will be required, splicing the optic nerves and such.
But its more reasonable to think well at least get a near-perfect audiovisual virtual reality headset in 20 years. If the numbers you're throwing around here are accurate, then there will be an 80 year stagnation in vr immersiveness, when the headsets are great but anything motion related feels fake, but computer/neural interfaces still limited to prosthetics, or at least out of reach for consumers and not powerful enough for vr.
80 years is a lot longer than TVs have been around, there's plenty of time for graphics card companies to rule the world.
Sensory augmentation will probably start with dream augmenting tech (headsets that are able to give you "good" dreams by learning your neural firing patterns), then as delivery systems, nanotech, processing and brain knowledge gets better, we'll see it evolve into waking experience augmentation.