inFAMOUS by a good margin actually.

It looks better and sharper than Ryse even being Open World... the annimations are better in Ryse.

Killzone SF is in the runner ups too.

Infamous First light is probably the best imho.

Open world 1080p and the minimum framerate is 29fps.

Ryse look good but it's linear,900p and horrible framerate.

From a technical standpoint, Shadow Fall. 1080p, material based rendering, tesselation (absent on SS), good AA. Ryse could get the spot, but the 900p presentation hampers image clarity. Second Son looks gorgeous, specially for an open world game, but it lacks some of the tesselated goodness of SF. Metro LL Redux is closer to SF.

The rest of the games distant. Driveclub and FH2 looks good, but both have their shortcomings in specific areas. Ryse has the best character models and animations. Shadow Fall has the best lightning, tesselation and overall visuals. Metro has the best textures.

It's interesting to note that none of them are really "next-gen". Most games launching now use last gen technics. Some use a mix of last and new gen techs (Shadow Fall, Shadow of Mordor, Ryse, Forza 5 and Horizon 2, Driveclub, Second Son, etc), but they have their shorcomings, old assets here and there and so on.

Now, people saying Far Cry 4 are out of their mind. The game isn't nowhere near close to next gen and only uses last gen tech. Good game of course, but here we are discussing technology.

Infamous is still at the top of the mountain. Driveclub is impressive, but it's easier to pull off. The facial animations hurt Killzone.

Lords of the Fallen is my favorite looking game of the Gen so far.

It's called tesselation. Any game with that (like Ryse) will look better on close-ups than a game without it (SS). It's on Shadow Fall:

And Crysis 3:

It's not just for faces, it does wonders for terrain too:

So you can't compare overall graphics just with facial close-ups between games with/without tesselation. It doesn't matter how good your character models look, tesselation increases poly count and gives a big edge. Overall, Ryse beats Second Son. I just don't see it as the best this gen because of the 900p resolution that blurries the resultant image, and image clarity is a big thing when discussing graphics (or PC gamers wouldn't be so obsessed with 4K).

Someone just vote bombed Ryse The polls here are always entertaining.

It's obvious that anyone without bias should be saying Infamous, if we are talking purely technical here. Ryse looks pretty good (and would some of you use real screenshots, not pre-rendered cutscene pics?), but it's not hard to when you're only running your game at 900p, have extremely linear gameplay, while having a poor framerate (sometimes dropping into the teens.) Infamous, on the other hand, not only looks gorgeous, but it is open world, runs above 30 FPS most of the time, and is pulling off incredible particle/lighting effects at the same time. No competition.

Your first comparison u had a point, but you shot yourself in the foot here as this clearly gives the edge to Infamous.

As close as they are however, my main reason for giving it to Infamous is that it looks this good as an open world game and delivers a smooth performance throughout with much more going on.  Ryse was much more linear and still managed to drop frames occasionally.