What's great is, you don't have to download mods, and build a killer PC to make Uncharted 2 look that good. You just need to go to walmart and get any 299 PS3. Not bad, aye?

Wow, the fact that Zen actually bothered to make a well thought down response to this post astounds me.(If not well thought, at least an intelligent one).

Wow!! U2 is actually comparable to freaking Crysis. The OP made me realize just how absolutely fabulous U2 looks, and it's on a console.

seriously, crysis looks amazing. Funny how uncharted 2 looks kinda average when compared agaisnt it. Not sure if those screenshots are accurate of how the game looks when playing though - I've played neither so I don't know.

I want crysis after seeing this...so much eye candy.

Crysis 2 is still better. I don't think anything this gen will beat Crysis graphically

I actually agree with most of what you said, im just pointing out how ahead of its time Crysis was.

As far as diminishing returns goes, it will affect both consoles and PC, where i think the real progression will be is effects that games use, especially with technologies like ray-tracing set to become more prevalant.

Essentially what is happening is that Consoles are becoming more and more like uniformly packaged PC's with little room for customization, which has the significant advantage of luring developer support due to this uniformity, in addition to a significant lack of piracy.

However i do think that PC's still have a place and will continue to have a place. Multiplats will always look better on it, the online is superior and free, and PCs can do a whole lot more than gaming! Its not like i just use my PC to play games, i use it for the internet, word processing, assignments, excel, emailing. So the cost is somewhat justified for me.

While these comparisons aren't practical (the PS3 can't output the resolution of these files, and far less than 1% of all dedicated gaming PCs can actually sustain a playable frame rate at the displayed resolution/settings of these screen captures) they do have me questioning the common claim that CryEngine 3 will only be able to play at the equivalent of "Medium" settings on a console as medium settings on Crysis or Warhead don't compare with the U2 bull shots displayed in the OP. They're a lot closer to "High" settings.

Of course the final proof for me lies in the practical application, which means comparing how Crysis looks on my PC (now a mid-range E8400 @ 3.9ghz with a 512MB HD4870 and 4GB RAM) and how U2 looks on the same 1920x1080 display.

I think the future ceiling of visuals on current generation consoles is simply an issue of memory. System memory to an extent, but particularly in texture memory for the GPU. Even the Xbox with its shared memory architecture will run into constraints with only a total of 512MB of RAM to work with, even at the lower resolution of 1280x720.

But considering that Crysis is still the be all end all to PC graphics, the difference really isn't that drastic anymore.

Uncharted has some amazing graphics, but this one hands down goes to Crysis. I swear I thought I was looking into a window.

Crysis looks a lot better imo.

BTW, Crysis pictures were so visually demanding, my computer failed to load some of them....