Oh, yeah, forgor about GoW. Not a fan of the game, but it certainly looked impressive. Which makes me wonder that nowadays is really hard to impress me in that way graphically speaking. There wasn't a huge leap between gens. Not that I mind, lots of really good games have released this gen. But graphically speaking it seems a bit same-y, in general.

Yeah, honestly the last game to really wow me graphically was Uncharted 2 in 2009. There have been games since then that have looked amazing, but nothing that's really made me think "wow, how is this even a video game".

For me... That was Crysis back in 2007.
Playing that game on Dual-GPU Geforce 7 7950 GX2 was pretty amazing... And that was the game that set the PC apart from the Console peasants. - That game still holds it's own even today. It's nuts.

Before Crysis I have to hand it to the original Halo, on PC, where you had full Pixel-Shader 2.0 effects... Or Morrowind. A massive open-world game, lots of mods, amazing water effects that leveraged the PC and original Xbox's pixel shader capabilities.
And you could even leverage Tessellation on the PC.

Though I never had a rig that could play it, seeing Crysis running on a friend's PC back in the day astounded me.

There are still games that have my jaw on the floor based on how good they look on the hardware. Other M and Xenoblade X are two of them.

Rogue Leader still looks great on my 24 inch 1080p tv even though it only runs in 480p.

The last time graphics really blew me away was the first Gears of War. Games like Battlefield 1 impress me, but I was expecting those sort of graphics back in 2014, and feel that it should not have taken so long for graphics that truly look a gen above 7th gen to come out. I've become really jaded when it comes to graphics, which might be why I've come to care so little about processing power.

To be fair... I don't think Battlefield 1 or 4's console graphics is generationally better than Battlefield 3 on PC anyway.

StarWars: Battlefront can look impressive thanks to Photogrammetry... Metro 2033 pushed the envelope during it's day.

I am surprised so many think Gears was great, graphically, to me it is just another Unreal Engine 3 game. Haha
I think Bioshock was the first game that truly showed us what the Unreal Engine 3 could do, rather than Gears.

I think it astounded everyone who saw it.
The graphics were so ahead of it's time and so ahead of the hardware that was available on the market (Even on PC), that it literally wen't viral... Pretty sure Crysis 2 and 3 didn't have the same success as the first game... I know Crysis 2 was ridiculed for it's graphics in the PC space.

Donkey Kong Country on the SNES blew me away the first time I saw it, lol.

Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast.

Jaw dropping gaming moments for me in addition to Rogue Leader would be Shenmue on dreamcast, Mario 64 on N64, Conker's Bad Fur Day on original xbox and the original Half Life on pc. For portables all I can think of is Little Big planet on psp, that looked amazing. I think for platforms that generally impressed overall for graphics it would be amiga and super nintendo where both delivered a huge upgrade in graphic quality across many games. Starfighter 3000 on Acorn Archimedes was very impressive for its time but I doubt many will know about that game. It was about the same time as Star Fox on super nintendo but had more open world environments, stages in asteroid fields and lots of scifi references including a battle with a starship enterprise look a like. Also you could change parameters so you could see your viewpoint and even the enemies viewpoint as you came in and blew it apart.

Actually, Bioshock didn't use Unreal engine 3.  It used a version of Unreal engine 2.

When Gears came out in 2006 it was far and away the best looking game of all time.  The best the PS3 had was Resistence 1, and the previous 360 games looked primitive in comparison.  In 2007 we started seeing games that rivaled or suprassed it, but no game on PC or consoles came close in 2006.  I don't think even Crisis blew away its competition as much as Gears did in 2006.