https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOFCEQl47Bc

This cinematic always comes to mind, they were way ahead of their time, and the gameplay wasn't too far off from the cinematics. And I forgot about DOA, the fighting game AND the volleyball game, basically, everything from team Ninja in those OG Xbox days were ahead of its time.

I played both, and found uncharted had more varied environments and overall was more visually pleasing. I also liked the water more. Crysis may seem photo realistic, but a lot of the foilage seemed recycled and upclose the detail wasn't great, almost generic. Some aliasing and texture detail lacking. Also explosion effects were ok. Crysis also used motion blur and depth of field to hide a lot of trees and foilage in the back.  I feel like uncharted did a better job conveying that island feel. It felt more organic overall.Maybe it was more tropical island but foilage and stuff had that wet darker look, so me it felt more real looking. The greens had a pop to it and had different levels.  Also when you get to the caves or the chapel, shadows lighting and texture detail felt real. The game floored me more than crysis and was the best looking game till uncharted 2 then 3.

I played both, and found uncharted had more varied environments and overall was more visually pleasing. I also liked the water more. Crysis may seem photo realistic, but a lot of the foilage seemed recycled and upclose the detail wasn't great, almost generic. Some aliasing and texture detail lacking. Also explosion effects were ok. Crysis also used motion blur and depth of field to hide a lot of trees and foilage in the back.  I feel like uncharted did a better job conveying that island feel. It felt more organic overall.Maybe it was more tropical island but foilage and stuff had that wet darker look, so me it felt more real looking. The greens had a pop to it and had different levels.  Also when you get to the caves or the chapel, shadows lighting and texture detail felt real. The game floored me more than crysis and was the best looking game till uncharted 2 then 3.

What you are delving into is art and gameplay, not graphics... And personal taste and not the technical aspects.
In short your opinion vs facts.

Crysis was certainly technically superior than any 7th gen console game, it had the best lighting effects (it had allot of dynamic aspects that wasn't baked like uncharted.), ambient occlusion, really really good per-object motion blur, parallax mapping, destructible physics...

It's rendering pipeline was so ahead of it's time it took even PC games years to catch up and surpass it... And even today some rendering aspects of Crysis beats modern game releases, due to the focus of having quality over speed.

Crysis was a graphics powerhouse that was easily a step up over Uncharted or any Playstation 3 game... Running at full 1080P was a massive benefit that fell in the PC's favor rather than Uncharted's muddy 720P presentation.

*******************

I am going to use the images from the original hardware rather than anything enhanced/remastered.


Some standouts for me was Killer Instinct on the Super Nintendo.
It was the first game (beating Donkey Kong!) where 3D rendered models were turned into sprites for the art work and looked absolutely fantastic at the time... There were even reflections, Mode 7 graphics, shadowing and a heap of other effects going on. Impressive stuff for the time.

Perfect Dark on Nintendo 64.
Boy was this a standout title... Reflections, lens flare, motion blur, shadowing, intricate (for the time) geometry, tons of A.I characters, transparency effects and so much more, it was a graphics powerhouse for the Nintendo 64... With sadly a framerate that suffered because of it.

The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on Original Xbox.
Before Skyrim there was Oblivion, before Oblivion... There was... Well. Morrowind.

This was a title that really showcased pixel shadered water really well for the first time, it was open world, amazing geometric complexity with dynamic lighting and shadowing also being prevalent.
And if you owned a PC with a Radeon 8500 or newer you could enjoy Tessellation via a patch, years before Tessellation was a standard feature in consoles that happened with the 8th generation.

What makes this a title that extended past the OG Xbox's hardware was the fact that the game is very much a memory hog, Bethesda actually had to force the console to do a "reboot" via a "hack" during a loading screen... And the game very much used the mechanical hard drive as a "virtual " to the fullest extent to stream data from.

Halo 3 on Xbox 360.

Halo 3 has a triple buffered, HDR lighting pipeline, it was stupidly intensive, it was dynamic, it was impressive, it showed what the Xbox 360 could do.
It leveraged the Truform tessellator found in the Xbox 360 to create water deformation and the triple buffer allowed for post-process effects like Cortana being a "memory" to the chief, things like lense flares, specular highlights and other effects rounded out the package.

Ironically later entries in the franchise took a baked approach to lighting and shadowing because it was cheaper... But people seemed to like those results better aesthetically, despite Halo 3 having the technical lighting edge.

Battlefield 3 PC.
If there was a game to define some of the technologies that would underpin the 8th generation... That game would be Battlefield 3.
At this point the PC was starting to stretch it's legs and games were starting to look a generation ahead of console games... The full deferred rendering lighting pipeline was the first big leap since Halo 3's HDR lighting pipeline.
The geometric complexity was immense, texture and mesh streaming from disk also allowed for very intricate detailing.
DICE also implemented a new animation system so model animations looked more realistic and fluid.

Destruction, particles, smoke/fog effects were all top notch... And is a game that still looks fantastic today, which is a testament to Frostbite and DICE's technical direction at the time.

Ghost of Tsushima. - Playstation 4.
This game probably sets the graphics benchmark for the 8th gen.
Physically based rendering, volumetric clouds, fully dynamic real time lighting and shadowing, immense vegetation draw distances, GPU accelerated particle effects with per-pixel lighting. This game is simply beautiful to behold and a technical showcase for the Playstation 4 as a whole.

What you are delving into is art and gameplay, not graphics... And personal taste and not the technical aspects.
In short your opinion vs facts.

Crysis was certainly technically superior than any 7th gen console game, it had the best lighting effects (it had allot of dynamic aspects that wasn't baked like uncharted.), ambient occlusion, really really good per-object motion blur, parallax mapping, destructible physics...

It's rendering pipeline was so ahead of it's time it took even PC games years to catch up and surpass it... And even today some rendering aspects of Crysis beats modern game releases, due to the focus of having quality over speed.

Crysis was a graphics powerhouse that was easily a step up over Uncharted or any Playstation 3 game... Running at full 1080P was a massive benefit that fell in the PC's favor rather than Uncharted's muddy 720P presentation.

*******************

I am going to use the images from the original hardware rather than anything enhanced/remastered.


Some standouts for me was Killer Instinct on the Super Nintendo.
It was the first game (beating Donkey Kong!) where 3D rendered models were turned into sprites for the art work and looked absolutely fantastic at the time... There were even reflections, Mode 7 graphics, shadowing and a heap of other effects going on. Impressive stuff for the time.



Perfect Dark on Nintendo 64.
Boy was this a standout title... Reflections, lens flare, motion blur, shadowing, intricate (for the time) geometry, tons of A.I characters, transparency effects and so much more, it was a graphics powerhouse for the Nintendo 64... With sadly a framerate that suffered because of it.


The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on Original Xbox.
Before Skyrim there was Oblivion, before Oblivion... There was... Well. Morrowind.

This was a title that really showcased pixel shadered water really well for the first time, it was open world, amazing geometric complexity with dynamic lighting and shadowing also being prevalent.
And if you owned a PC with a Radeon 8500 or newer you could enjoy Tessellation via a patch, years before Tessellation was a standard feature in consoles that happened with the 8th generation.

What makes this a title that extended past the OG Xbox's hardware was the fact that the game is very much a memory hog, Bethesda actually had to force the console to do a "reboot" via a "hack" during a loading screen... And the game very much used the mechanical hard drive as a "virtual " to the fullest extent to stream data from.


Halo 3 on Xbox 360.

Halo 3 has a triple buffered, HDR lighting pipeline, it was stupidly intensive, it was dynamic, it was impressive, it showed what the Xbox 360 could do.
It leveraged the Truform tessellator found in the Xbox 360 to create water deformation and the triple buffer allowed for post-process effects like Cortana being a "memory" to the chief, things like lense flares, specular highlights and other effects rounded out the package.

Ironically later entries in the franchise took a baked approach to lighting and shadowing because it was cheaper... But people seemed to like those results better aesthetically, despite Halo 3 having the technical lighting edge.



Battlefield 3 PC.
If there was a game to define some of the technologies that would underpin the 8th generation... That game would be Battlefield 3.
At this point the PC was starting to stretch it's legs and games were starting to look a generation ahead of console games... The full deferred rendering lighting pipeline was the first big leap since Halo 3's HDR lighting pipeline.
The geometric complexity was immense, texture and mesh streaming from disk also allowed for very intricate detailing.
DICE also implemented a new animation system so model animations looked more realistic and fluid.

Destruction, particles, smoke/fog effects were all top notch... And is a game that still looks fantastic today, which is a testament to Frostbite and DICE's technical direction at the time.



Ghost of Tsushima. - Playstation 4.
This game probably sets the graphics benchmark for the 8th gen.
Physically based rendering, volumetric clouds, fully dynamic real time lighting and shadowing, immense vegetation draw distances, GPU accelerated particle effects with per-pixel lighting. This game is simply beautiful to behold and a technical showcase for the Playstation 4 as a whole.