For consoles, UC2/3, God of War 3, and Killzone 2/3 best everything.
The only impressive thing about God of War 3 is that Kratos himself is 60,000 polygons. Most of the stuff that game does isn't all that impressive (lighting/reflections are great), and, in fact, is pre-rendered (lots of HD video on that disc). Good texture quality, but, again, if you actually go check out some scenes in God of War 3, you'll find a metric shit ton of areas with far less geometry than they appear to have. It's a great game, but graphically not all that great. It's the art direction that makes God of War look so great. From a technical perspective, it's pretty weak.
Metro 2033, which released the same year, was vastly superior, even on consoles (was it on the PS3? Wondering if anyone did a 1:1 comparison).
Should've probably picked a better example, but this isn't true.
For draw distance, etc, it doesn't even beat U2. Nepal and the ice/mountain areas are ridiculous.
Uncharted 2's draw distance is actually pretty small, and they pull Valve's trick of resizing some things in the distance to make them appear larger than they are. Most of the stuff in Nepal is actually like... iirc, less than a mile? Most of the stuff that appears far away is either simplistic geometry (in Nepal, you basically just have a bunch of little--as in, not to scale--cubes as far away buildings and some skyboxes). IIRC, the actual draw distance in Uncharted 2 is never more than a mile or so.
Halo 3 has one of the largest draw distances of any video game in history, at fourteen miles--iirc, that's further than anything Crytek has done (but that's because, in Cryengine 3, at least, they're actually rendering water underneath the map at all times, which results in a performance hit). I had read that Reach doubled it, but I have a hard time believing that.
And, on top of that, Halo 3 will tesselate the water. The water will ripple dynamically when you walk through it. In Uncharted, this is not the case--it's all canned animations. The PS3 isn't even capable of tesselation, actually, due to the limitations of the RSX (apparently the Cell can theoretically do it, but the Cell can do a lot of things theoretically).
You could've at least chosen Reach as an example. Doesn't 3 run at an absurdly low resolution? Its IQ is quite poor.
It's not absurdly low--it's higher than Alan Wake's 540p, since it's at 640, but yeah, the IQ is pretty poor in some areas. The game doesn't alias very well. Reach is running at 1152 x 720, iirc.
I mentioned 3 mostly because it's got tesselation, which, insofar as I can tell, is very rare for a console game, so while Reach does have better IQ and draw distance, it isn't running technology that shouldn't even be possible on current-gen consoles, and Halo 3 is.
You saying that doesn't prove it though. We don't believe you, that's his point.
I am having a hard time understanding how people don't believe that art design and technical graphics are two different things. I'm certainly not the first to mention it in this thread.
In a battle between "what game looks better," Uncharted is likely to win. In a battle of graphics... well, that's objectively measurable. Haha. I just looked up Uncharted 2's draw distance, and while I couldn't find a number, I did find a pic that's very visibly a skybox. Consider me amused.
I'm pretty sure it's required by Sony to run at 30 FPS most of the time. Screen tearing is probably fixed with v-sync at release. It was enabled during the first cutscene, so I'm hoping.
