That looked down. I'll be getting a new PC next year to run this at least on high.

I downloaded the 1080p pc timelapse video from Eurogamer and watched it on the big screen. The extra resolution sure makes it look better in the distance, but the textures up close are just as bad. Geometry isn't much better, trees and rocks are very angular and the shadows although improved are still pretty poor in some areas. I had expected more from the pc version to be honest.

The timelapse does highlight the awesome weather and day night transitions but it ruins some of the other effects. The snow blowing of the cliffs looks quite poor and the scrolling water is even worse.

I don't think you miss much on the consoles. Things look better in the distance on pc, at the trade off that it makes the low res textures and low polycount geometry in the foreground stand out more.

Good points.  Yeah, in the PC market the focus is often on the top tier PC specs even though only a minority ever have them typically.

TBH I think, and I think Carmack from id said this himself, that we need a bit of an overhaul of some of the basic engine approaches to improve the kinds of things you mention, improved streaming/loading of assets and so on.  I understand the cost benefit of getting a lot out of an initial build - heck look at Valve with Source Platform, they've arguably leveraged a slowly adapting engine better than anyone.  But, to really see a jump we do need some new techniques ideally married to SDK environments which reduce cost/effort of creating games/content.

Also, I need more justification for my PC!

The Witcher 2 may be the best looking polygonal game of the year IMO, but it doesn't come close to exploiting a modern PC with it's DX9 32bit engine, rather crappy looking shadows (still better than most console games and especially Skyrim's shadows) and the popin it can suffer from at times.

OT: I really wish that Bethesda had put some work into the engine on PC, their claims of a rewritten engine just look absurd when it suffers from so many of the same issues as Oblivion. It is still DX9 (rewriting the engine without actually utalising new tech seems stupid), texture resolution is barely higher, it's not even large address aware, animation system seems to be the same tho their new mocap studio seems to have helped, you still have to load to enter cities and even small buildings not to mention many dungeons have a mid point load, draw distance suffers the same limitations and is not being able to load more "grids" than Oblivion while still being stable(the new distant LOD system for mountins is good tho), shadows seem the same to worse, not large address aware by default etc. Their art team seems to have really pushed it to the next level despite the limitations of current consoles.

Hopefully modders can fix some of the glaring issues (console quality textures etc) but the big issues are tied into the ancient engine (shadows, streaming, animation, physics, RAM utilization, poor multicore scaling etc). Some mods have made some headway already and the mod tools will help a lot, Oblivion had some great visual mods.

You know, it is odd they seem to have produced a better DX9 engine than Oblivion and nothing more.

I'd have thought they'd have put in DX11 assuming the next gen of consoles would support it (next Xbox for sure I thought would).  The fact they felt DX9 was all they needed seems to imply they believe they have more time this gen to stick with DX9 than rumours of an iminent new Xbox would imply.

Of course I guess they might figure they can add DX11 later, but it does seem silly not to add it now, get their hands dirty with the PC version in preperation for next gen DX11 titles on PS4/Nextbox and PC.

It's more that it's not actually a new engine, it's a modified version of the Fallout 3 engine which was a modified Oblivion engine which was a modified Morrowind engine which was a modified Gamebryo. If you look in the ini files and play arround a bit it's pretty clear, all the ini stuff is basically the same as morrowind, there are many of the same odities to the engine like when you go in water if you have the surface of the water in the middle of the screen you can see clearly underwater etc

some screens

Every game since Morrowind has had the same "glitch" so it shows that water is handled exactly the same, the only change is they now use animated textures for the surface with a more pronounced specular pass. There are many other things in the game that show the lineage. It's clear their "brand new engine" is actually just the same old engine optomised for modern consoles, that is why it's not DX11 etc.

I said earlier that the ps3 version doesn't feel all that different from the pc version (apart from the resolution ofcourse)

Well it does now after the patch to 1.02. Lighting has taken a big hit and so has the water. It's quite ugly now from a distance and dungeons look a lot duller. The lag is gone however yay...

i don't want to bother with you anymore, how is that being close minded? there is no PC elitim in this thread only one closed minded person who doesn't want to think his console has outdated hardware.

do not want what exactly?