ASOBO
A plague tale and Microsoft flight simulator are really good looking games.

@Qwark Yeah those a good picks. Insomniac focusing purely on next gen consoles with Spiderman 2 and Wolverine should give some amazing results. Can't wait, especially for the latter. Suckerpunch could be another contender too.

Iirc Witcher 3 was one of the best looking open world games on consoles upon release and still holds up quite well on base PS4 consoles. And Cyberpunk 2077, looks decent if not for the inconsistent performance and resolution/s. Though I'm going to put this down a lot to biting more then they can chew and time constraints. We'll see. But yeah their focus seems mostly on PC, it seems at least in terms of optimisation.

Kinda hard to word it because really even a PS4-XB1 era game, if you crank the resolution to native 4K and 60 fps, the PS5/XSX are likely going to struggle with some games, but if just turn on ray tracing it will basically choke the system to death at those settings.

So even for a developer only working in the PS4-tier of visuals, they'll be able to in theory max out the console if they really want to.

This may sound like a weird answer but, Nintendo. Only they won't do it during the next gen window you are thinking. They will, instead, do it around the Switch 3 launch. Being always at least one gen behind, they get the optimization/refinery of that gens capabilities down to a T by the time they get there. Switch is basically Wii U on steroids, so it's mostly comparable to PS3/360 tech, yet the quality of their games with that tech is amazing. By the time we have a PS7/Series XXX, Nintendo will have perfected what PS5/Series X started. Odd answer lol.

I don't think that's what TC means. As in not taxing the system to the max; any developer could do that. Its optimising a game/engine with maximum efficiency to achieve the best performance/fidelity possible on that given machine.

We're still in the infancy in this generation with developers barely scratching the surface of whats possible with PS5/Xbox Series consoles. Take the new feature sets for example.. in so far no games have taken advantages of mesh/primitive shaders. This alone will drastically boost performance by orders of magnitude.

In any case stuff like the Matrix Awakens tech demo or UE5 demo is a small glimpse into what kind of fidelity could and should expect to see in a couple of years. I'd wager we'll see some developers match even exceed some of the graphics done in those demos.

It doesn't matter if they truly push the console to their limit, the extra power will still push games further than the developer could have with weaker hardware due to easier development cycles with less bottlenecks to optimize around. So even of a developer never hits the ceiling, they will still benefit from the generational leap.

As for the specific devs that pull it off, probably the same ones as last gen.

Whoever made Crab game.

Once PS4 and Xbone are cut loose and the 9th gen consoles are no longer held back by having to accommodate circa 2013 hardware (which wasn't high end even back then) we should start to see PS5 and Xbox Series really come into their own.

As with every gen, a select few studios will stand head and shoulders above 98% of the rest, and usually a lot of the same ones as past generations too, as already listed.

With the 7th gen it was Gears of War that first showcased the real power of the new consoles; hopefully we see this generation's equivalent in 2022.