let release a later build demo, so that one can pass a judgement...till then I remain very skeptical about all the praises it's been receiving.

We'll see.

I'm more of the notion that the primary goal of the revised Cry Engine is not to once again make an engine that is only optimized for hardware to be released 2-3 years in the future, but optimized to play on the broad majority of hardware platforms which naturally includes consoles.

Custom "ultra" settings on Crysis will probably end up looking better than unmodified Crysis 2 on its highest settings.

when people call crysis simply "graphics king" there are many things they don't take into account. Now before i'm flamed for this. Let me say that I do 3d animation and that my pc rig is a 12gig ddr3 ram machine with a x5770 and a core i7 930.
I run crysis on ultra high.


Now crysis is no doubt the best looking in some departments. SOME being the key word. Other areas the game is clearly starting to show it's age. And wether or not it was king to begin with in third is debatable.

Alien VS Predator looks better than crysis in some aspects. (tesselation helps.)

Killzone 2 has better particle explosions (in my opinion) along with better animations and better lighting.
Uncharted 2 has more fluidity of animations and a more broad view of landscapes and large draw distance locations.
God of war 3 pounds it in scale and beats it in some visual fidelitys.

Simply calling crysis king without mentioning that it's actually only in some aspects either show your igorance, a will to avoid certain things.

Ofcourse the real key here is that a large amount of these things are opinion, as they has to be. Concidering most games are made in different styles and shades.

@ bolded:

Aliens Vs Predator- What aspects? I haven't played it so it'd be nice to know.

Killzone 2- Animations is something Cytek could improve on, however, much of the lighting in Killzone 2 is cleverly "faked" whilst in Crysis it's realtime.

Uncharted 2- Again, animations is something that needs to be improved, but whilst Uncharted offers broad landscapes (and very impressive ones at that), the linear nature of the game means you can't get to every area in the game like you can in Crysis. Plus you can set the draw distance in Crysis to whatever your PC will allow, which would be a lot more than UC2 with the PC you've mentioned.

God of War 3- Haven't played it yet (except the demo) so I won't comment on this one.

There are 2 sides to the graphics argument. The technical aspect and the artistic aspect. On the technical side Crysis really is the king in the vast majority of areas, that can't really be questioned no matter your opinion of the artistry used.

2 sites

1 that matter, 1 that is a fanboy site

==> only 1 site worht the value

@If you play awp on a direct x 11 card on max it's a very pretty game in some areas. In other areas it looks mediocre. In general it's a surprisingly good game though... When the multiplayer works it's particularly awesome.

@Killzone 2 comment. Well static lights does not make them fake. Most games just deal with global illumination while killzone 2 has hundreds of light sources that you react towards. If you are speaking of "day nighttime" cycle, it's not impressive. It just doesn't make sense for a lot of games... It is a good thing in crysis though.

@god of war. Well the demo has nothing on the full game. I can tell you that much.

@the final comment. Yes, in a majority of areas. But there are areas like the ones I mentioned where it isn't. It's also showing it's age in some places. For instance, the large rocks on the beach aren't very impressive anymore. Ofcourse that's a minor thing. Crysis still has some of the best water i've seen.

Graphics will be always good, but never gameplay

Crysis 2 beats Killzone 2 in lighting because it uses deferred rendering and HDR simultaneously, which is impossible in Killzone 2.
It beats Uncharted 2 in animation because it uses procedural animation allowing an infinite level of animation rather then the limited presents in Uncharted 2.
It beats god of war 3 in scale because each skyscraper in Crysis 2 is 4x larger than the largest titan in god of war 3 and it's sandbox.

Best looking console game yet.

It may look pretty but, I'm not impressed yet.