im sure you also wont argue that the valve team are talented. yet they cried like babies (atleast gabe newell did) because of the cell. remember?

so unless your implying that sony studios are so far ahead of the competition in terms of talent, I dont see why 3rd party developers wont be matching them this gen.

youre forgetting guerilla were working on KZ mercenary and also their other annanounced ps4 game.

1 game on 3 platforms is easier than 3 games on 2 platforms.

and ryse doesnt look good because its exclusive, it looks good because its using the cryengine.

anyway, i believe it wouldnt take a lot for a company like EA or activision to make a better looking game than sony on the PS4. If you dont believe it, i dont care, im not going to convince you.

psp, 3ds, ps2, ps1, xbox, 360. all have had 3rd party multiplatform games which look better than exclusives.

PS3 is an exception because of the cell which i already mentioned.

so yeah....It isn't rocket science, but believe what you will.

Small things like this is why Killzone deserves more attention and more sales. It just looks like such a better, more complete title than these yearly titles that are shoveled onto the public. 

PS2's best looking games were Final Fantasy, Shadow of the Colossus, Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid.  Those were all exclusives.

XBox's best looking games were Ninja Gaiden Black, Halo, and Forza.  The exception there is probably Spliter Cell Chaos Theory, but I would argue it is the exception and not the rule.

I don't know enough about the other consoles, but I would assume the same applies.  

I'm quite underwhelmed by the benchmarks the game has been getting

I certainly hope BF4 is not even close to the best the PS4 can do, they use some cheap post processing on it and I'm not even certain some settings are completely maxed looking at the DigitalFoundry comparisons with the PC, some reflections are weaker and there's less lightsources at places.

Even a single 7870 can run the game with 4xMSAA + Ultra + 1050p at 39FPS average if they dropped all settings to same as PS4, I wouldn't be suprised if it was enough to push it to the 60FPS mark. You can get a better budget gaming PC for the same price in a year or two.

PS2's best looking game was God of War 2, an exclusive.

Xbox's best looking game was Conker Live and Reloaded, an exclusive. (64 version doesn't count, Xbox version was developed exclusively)

360's best looking game is Halo 4, an exclusive.

3DS's best looking game is Resident Evil Revelations, originally an exclusive.

The most graphically advanced games on Gamecube and Wii were exclusives; Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, Jett Rocket, Conduit 1 & 2, Mario Galaxy 1 &2.

Battlefield 4 is using "High" equivalent PC settings on the Playstation 4, combined with a lower resolution.
The PC however is using Ultra, full 1080P and probably higher Texture filtering and better Anti-Aliasing to boot.

That's compounded by the fact that 1080P isn't even as high as the PC can go, 1440P panels are becoming plentifull and cheap, 1600P and 2160P(4k) panels are available, you can do eyefinity/surround vision too.
As usuall, if you are concerned about image quality, framerates and resolution you really wouldn't be gaming on a console, even the next-gen pales in comparison.

Plus Mantle will give AMD Radeon users a massive performance increase once it launches for all Frostbite powered games. - I wouldn't be surprised if a single 7870 get 60fps.

Reason why Battlefield 4 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is not running at 1080p is because it is a cheap port of PC version, a down port with little to no low level optimizations so it is running on high level API rather than slimmed down, more streamlined versions that don't have certain code path that is not used at all...

I think it is more of a fact that they wanted to try and achieve a stable 60fps. Similar cards to the PS4 and XBO run BF4 53fps and 33fps respectively in 1080p. PS4 should be capable of 30fps at 1440p with ultra settings. These systems are both very capabale, albet PS4 slightly more, but the fact remains we will see things from each that will go far beyond what we have seen from the best PC games so far. At the end of the day it still comes down to what the devs want to achieve. If they want the best cinimatic adventure possible they will shoot for 1080p 30fps, if they are shooting for a pure quick twitch gameplay experiance they will focus on 60fps and lower resolutions.