I would personally put the Beta of the online play on par with Gears 1.

outside you, nobody is considering Alan Wake trailer as a technical master piece

it is good but it is not jaw dropping.

And this is why people think KZ2 beats Crysis in graphics.  They just don't know much about Crysis.

The only areas in which Killzone 2 beats Crysis is in animaionts and MAYBE lighting.  Everythign else, Crysis totally owns Killzone 2.  Only the PC version of Far Cry 2 touches Crysis in graphics (and beats it in particle effects and other areas).

I was not referring solely to graphics, and even then KZ2 does not look "miles" better. Epic Games delivered on the first Gears and has delivered with many other great titles such as the Unreal series. Insomniac has delivered with R:FoM and other games such as Ratchet and Clank. Guerrilla Games has given us Killzone, Killzone: Liberation, and Shellshock: Nam 67. Tell me, which two companies are the safest bet to deliver the superior games...it sure as heck is not Guerrilla.

Wait until you play Killzone. 

Alright, I will wait until I have played Killzone to state that Resistance 2 is the shooter to own if you have purchased a PS3.

Maybe in polygonal detail, but the lighting and animations put to shame any other console game on the market, or coming to market soon.

As for whether the beta is representative of the final game, I'm not sure, but usually they cut back on things like textures and audio to make the beta download smaller, no?  The download was only 498 mb.

Edit: And the beta does not represent the final game's animations at all.  The hit and response system is taken out for multiplayer, and the Helghast in SP make much better use of cover than you can.

You won't be seeing stuff like this in the beta:

Not to mention, MP graphics usually look worse than SP graphics, and for a guy who never uses XBL...

Well yea, I don't think the Beta is representative. Sometimes its just a little too dark for me to even see if there are any graphical differences. Its just a "feeling" thats all, probably not fair to KZ2 since it was played last. I think Dead Space would be a good competitor in terms of lighting and actually its a very nice looking game too.

Halo 3 only does (a not solid) 30 FPS, to use two smaller seperate target renders to generate 1 output imagine was probably a way to keep the game 30 FPS together with HDR.

Basically, the game could probably have been done in:

1080p, no AA and no HDR (30 FPS).

640p, no AA, HDR (30 FPS, which is the case here for Halo 3).

720p, AA, no HDR, 30 FPS.

720p, no AA, no HDR, 60 FPS.

640p, AA, no HDR, 60 FPS. (a la COD4)

The EDRam approach is cheaper than two seperate memory pools (especially compared to the low latency high speed XDR Ram used with the PS3 geared towards the Cell). That's the main reason for this approach. 10 MB EDRam is not enough for a game like Halo 3, either the 10 MB EDRam had to be much bigger or the bandwidth from main Ram to the Xenos' EDRam needed to be much better to prevent (the effects of) tiling.

This all has very little to do with physics though, we talked about earlier.

Yeah, I hear ya.  Btw, check my edit.