I have a fairly good PC that does everything on the highest settings. I'm even playing my PS3/360 games on the very same monitor (24") and even then it's hard to notice differences.

Then when I'm visiting my brother and play the same games on his 50" Full HDTV, the differences are getting even more neglectable.

Of course anti-aliasing is one of the few differences that is easy to spot, but usually even PS3/360 games have enough of it (4x is perfectly fine), especially while playing on a couch.

I gotta disagree with you on that one (I think this is the first time I've ever done so!). The extra graphics bells and whistles offered to PC games like higher res, AF, better shadow processing and AA make a world of difference in my eyes. I also play on a 24" Samsung for my PC games but can transfer over to my 46" 1080p Samsung LED where I play my PS3 and 360. The bigger screen actually makes things like poor AF, lack of AA and pop-in more noticeable and detracting to me.

EDIT: Added the bolded

from what iv seen so far the graphics easily pass any racing game on a consol's about...oh yh ever ^^

off topic: Seriously, the OP's avatar is really annoying.

Most console games have no AA or max 2xAA also Shadows have often no AA. Textures are very blurry. And the lack of details is obvious also drawing distance and ofcourse resolution. The bigger the Screen the UGLIER Console games get. You are right that the technology is farther then the software because consoles slow down the process a little this gen. But the differences are big. Especially on a large screen.

If you are get used to console graphics the flaws are getting more and more obvious. For example the shadows in dead space are without AA. And in the beginnig I wasnt even seeing that recently I played it again and the blurry textures simple modelling (most is done with bump mapping)  and the shadows were so obvious to me that I couldnt concentrate on the game.

If you have a decent PC and a good game and you play it on the same Screen the differences are HUGE. Sure Console ports are similar but even then with mods and a powerful system the differences are obvious.

Look at a maxed out PC Metro 2033 play it on the same screen and shortly after play Metro 2033/Xbox 360.

The differences are HUGE. We are not quite there yet to say that the best what consoles have to offer and the best what PCs have to offer are one generation apart. But in 2 years we will.

My biggest problem with Console games are no AA and the textures also drawing distance and damn I want more vegatation.. Soon we will have a problem with the fact that there is no tesselation on consoles. 

The difference is not as big (but still big) as it used to be at this point in the previous life cycles but its getting bigger and bigger.

PC has heavy background workloads and developers need to worry about compatibility, which requires a certain midle layers  (directX for example) to deal with different hardware configuration. you just can't compare the spec directly.  though PC does offer better resolution and better AA, the lighting (which i think is the way more important than AA), physcis and AI are still at the similar level of consoles games. so not too much of a whole generation ahead but PC graphics is definitely better than consoles to some extend.

on a serious note, I'm curious to see how the next generation consoles can wow me. the best graphics in this gen is quite close to real life imo.

this game looks lifelike on 1080p and thats all i can ask for..... that being said... unless SONY'S FIRST PARTY DELEVOPERS LIKE NAUGHTY DOG OR SANTA MONICA develop it.....

the ps3's rediculous cpu power wont be utitlized properly.... the one question i have is why an RSX... combine a cell with the 360 gpu and you got a console that wont be touched for years....

cell/RSX > Xenos/Xenon

But not by much..

cell/Xenon > many pcs... but obviously not all of em..

1. Not really, unless you start playing games while compiling code or some equally demanding task. And given how much RAM PCs have these days the memory overhead from even a large amount of running processes is negligible,

2. Middle layers like Direct X and OpenGL? Oh, you mean the same APIs that the xbox and the PS3 use. And its because of those APIs that developers don't have to worry about coding for a million different hardware variations.

3. Uh, no. Even games ported over to PC from consoles have lighting and physics effects impossible on 360/PS3. Look at mirrors edge or Batman Arkham Asylum. You could probably make a decent argument that AI is superior on PC, but its one are that very few developers put any kind of money into, and consequently most games, regardless of platform, is using AI routines that haven't changed much in the past 5 years. But the PC could certainly beat consoles in AI if any developers decide to throw some serious work into it.

The Cell is hardly a great CPU for games, and its one that is now half a decade old. Sony had a fun little experiment, but their dream of derivative CPUS in just about everything under the sun never panned out, let alone their pie in the sky idea of distributed computing.  On top of that they did a bad job of predicting where GPUs were headed, especially in terms of raw power. But they did see the GPGPU trend popping up, and you have to give them credit for that - even though there entry into the market failed.

i don't know how much you know about computer techs. but your argument doesn't sound right.

when you are compiling code, you can't game well at all in most rigs. just try it. While your machine is idle, you can count how many services is lurking in your memory idling/spinning to handle requests such as firewall and anti-virus, well and possibly virus :). In theory, PC should be way more powerful than consoles. But those background task is closing the gap a lot.

xbox's dx 10 is specially tailored and optimized for xbox. i don't know about ps3's openGL, so i can't say. ps3 developers have already been utilizing spus for graphics too. i don't think regular version openGL can handle this at all.

I played Batman AA in PC with Nvidia Physx. Yes, it's better than console such as flying papers, nice mists and other little details but still it's not a generation ahead. as for lighting, i couldn't really tell much difference. Once you turn Physx off, it's quite similar to console version aside from AA and resolution. Not everyone has an Nvidia card.

AI is the only area that showed nearly no improvement this gen. I won't comment on that seriously. Claiming PC will definitely be better is a wild assumption.

Still, I don't think PC is one generation ahead and an curious to know what the next gen will be. If the tech doesn't advance too much, I may choose to skip a generation (or wait till later in the generation).