Crysis is really amazing and looks almost as good as a game can look. The only big step beyond that is solid framerate and a Dead Rising number of characters on-screen. Henceforth, next generation the difference between console games and PC ones will be even smaller.

Hmm I don't know about that, I don't think consoles next generation will be getting a leap graphicall wise as big is this one was from last.

Why not? Until 2011-2012 video cards strong enough to run Crysis at max will be hella cheap. Hell, 3 years ago a geforce 7 was 600 bucks.

Would you be willing to do the same test for Wii/PS360 multiplat by neutering the PS360 to wii spec and then say "let's see who does best"? If not then why do you do it here?

It would be better to work on a price basis: How cheap can you make a PC that plays at the same IQ and framerate as a console? And here consoles win thanks to the $200 xbox 360 arcade.

Anyway, this thread is confirming two things for me:

1) PS360's are a poor man's gaming PC. Just like PS3 owners say people would buy PS3 if they could afford it, some are buying PS3 because they can't afford gaming PC's.

2) the graphical differences between current gen consoles and next gen consoles (PS4...) is not likely to be high enough to matter to anybody but an increasingly tiny minority of people who can actually see the differences. This is already the case between SD and HD this gen for a good part of the general populace but will be increasingly true for most of today's graphic whores too.

#2 also means that Nintendo has a good chance of totally obliterating the competition next gen as its next consoles is likely to be 2-3 times more powerful than the Ps3/360 (thanks to moore's law) so they will be able to have a bigger share of the core gamers that will not be able to see a difference between Nintendo's next gen and MS&Sony's next gen (the same crowd that cannot see the difference between this gen and more than half a gen forward already on the PC) while likely to retain the vast majority of the new gamers thanks to the brand they are forging this generation.

And then Crysis 2 will come out and the next gen and beat those consoles into the ground as well. PC power is not constant, that's why PC games will look better.

How good a game can look better than Crysis? And that's wew we come back to my first point.

Well yes, there's a very nice little article about graphics and how useless hey are and how less of a return we get from them, however in some way it wil still look better than Crysis.

Heck, I haven't say it would not. But they would have to work far more for small graphical improvements.
Crysis at its max settings need like 1200 GFLOPS of GPU to achieve 30 fps.
Killzone 2 need 400 GFLOPS and run at 30 fps.
Crysis look 3 times better than K2? Damn no.

You can go to the whole graphics are important thread to see how much I can't give a damn about graphics, however there will always be clear-cut winners, however unnoticable, and those will be the games on the PC by default.

Games can look a lot more realistic than a game like Crysis, but the problem is we need to start moving towards global illumination techniques which require dramatically more processing power.