It's just not my experiences in many gaming forums it's known as one of the most impressive looking games ever up there with mario 64 in terms of blowing people away.

They are two of the most popular and promoted PS2 games from that early time in the console's life, so I suppose it makes sense they'd be a lot of people's first experience with 6th generation graphics.

Mine was Rogue Squadron II; saw it running at a store back then, at the time it looked like movie, so far beyond the N64 I had at home it seemed unbelievable that it was a video game at all.

Back in the days me and my friends used to say that the cutscenes from PS2 games like God of War II were like watching a movie.

Little did we know that a couple of generations later, we would compare in-game graphics with real life...

I love this.

Yea that was pretty damn impressive looking game, heck same with residential evil 4 on ps2 I was like Xbox is the most powerful system but this impresses more then anything on Xbox  basically resident evil 4 gc was the best looking game that gen.

Yeah RE4 was the best looking 6th gen game for me as well.

I guess there are games on Xbox that had more advanced shaders and stuff, but as a whole package, from its art direction to its character models to its effects, RE4 was just stunning.

While the PS2 is undoubtly significantly more powerful than the Dreamcast in most aspects, its shortcomings when it comes to video output are so bad that I tend to prefer the look of the Dreamcast games.

Super N64? That's the worst and most incorrect description of Dreamcast I have ever seen. Laughably wrong.

Even permalite says it's feature set is closer to n64 then 6th gen consoles and  to me the graphics are massively improved but it doesn't really deliver what 6th gen consoles did interms of lighting polygon models and effects they all looked like n64 games if it was 10x more powerful.

The Nintendo 64 and Dreamcasts hardware feature set shared similarities from a fundamental perspective in the way it handles things (I.E. Lack of TnL, AA, hardware motion blur etc'), however the Dreamcast chip was "smarter" and more efficient (Due to it's tiled based approach) plus had more resources to truly shine. (8MB of Ram vs 26MB total.)

I think people are confusing the difference between "power" and "hardware capability/feature set" they aren't actually the same... We need to also remember that the Nintendo 64 was based on SGI's technology which was actually significantly more advanced than competing solutions found in the Saturn, Playstation 1, 3DO, Jaguar and was more in line with PC GPU's of the time. (I.E. Direct X 6.0 graphics processors with full filtered textures.)

Let's take the Gamecube and Original Xbox... Gamecube used TEV or "Texture Environment Unit" which is a cute acronym for what is fundamentally a colour combiner... Not to different (But still different) to a pixel shader. - Difference with the TEV is it also conveniently bundles a texture read as part of that pipeline... The Xbox didn't need that as it was rather proficient at Single-pass Multi-Texturing anyway.

So theoretically the Gamecube and Original Xbox from a GPU feature set (At-least in regards to shader-like effects) are capable of a similar level of output.
The Original Xbox however was just significantly faster... So it could use those effects more often and more prominently...
Which is why we got things like pixel shader water in Morrowind... The Gamecube could do it also, but just not to the same level or scope, despite not technically even having direct X compliant "pixel shaders".

Another example is the 3dfx voodoo effect... Even though it's feature set was technically a generation behind the nVidia, ATI, S3, Matrox, Rendition etc' GPU's of the day... It could offer significantly more performance, so whilst other GPU's took a significant hit to performance by enabling certain features like texture filtering, the voodoo didn't, so it could use it more often and games looked better as a result.

The Playstation 2 did have some distinct hardware nuances that really could showcase what the hardware was capable of... But it was also a console that was supported heavily by the entire gaming industry due to it's install base and length of time on the market, something the Dreamcast didn't have.

A Super Nintendo 64 is probably not an accurate way to really describe what the Dreamcast was... It was a console that technologically straddled two generations, similar to the Nintendo 64.
If Nintendo had a decent memory sub-system (I.E. No 4kb texture cache) and could use single/half precision floats, the Nintendo 64 would have been a far more impressive beast visually.

Ps1 to ps2