PGR 4 still looks a generation ahead of both DC and FH2. And rather than doing some shitty low detail countryside its rendering photo-realistic cities.
As someone who spent months of playhours in all PGR games and who has the lifetime respect for job done by Bizzare, I can understand your point from one side of argument.
Yes, no single game has still reached the level of environment complexity of cities as PGR3 (you even have me and Shinn equaly praising that aspect and still hunting the comparison images over net, almost a decade later), so noone objects that.
I still personally find the loss of all PGR assets as the greatest loss of the genre, ever. They are somewhere is someones archives and they will gether dust until all of us die. And those assets could be used even today, simply because the meshes and textures were made a decade ahead of their time (all textures in PGR3 were 1M pixels for instance and they still look photorealistic).
But saying PGR4 looks generation "ahead" of both DC and FM2 is really a hyperbole. Low def output resolution, lack of AA, prebaked lightning, almost no volumetric effects or proper alphas, janky cockpit animations... Yes, when looking from todays perspective, all those are minuses, despite I agree on everything else. But you can't be selective when you provide absolute opinion.
If going that way, I could say how PS2 version of F355 Challenge was a "generation ahead" of almost all PS3/X360 racers. It may be accurate (not "true", there is a difference) from one point of view, but it is not accurate from absolute viewpoint.
