I'm late to this thread so I apologize if this has been brought up before, but to me the relative state of graphics between Xbone and PS4 E3 showings is that of technical ambition or rather over-ambition on the PS4 developers' side.
The first wave of Xbone titles is playing it safe: the engines are employing the same set of rendering techniques prevalent during late current generation development (deferred rendering, pre-calculated lighting, post process AA). The developers have fine tuned these techniques to perfection with their last current gen titles and when applied to hardware with 5 times the theoretical shading performance, nearly 5 times the texturing performance, more than 3 times the geometry performance, pixel fill rate and memory bandwidth (both pools) it produces mind blowing results. To me personally, Forza 5 represents the best example of generational leap in perceivable graphics quality since the time I switched from N64 to Dreamcast.
On the other side certain PS4 devs seem intent on upping the ante on the technical side, implementing fully dynamic lighting models, MSAA?, various types of background simulation models (dynamic cloud formation in Drive Club, GPU accelerated particle physics in Knack) and so on. The question that presents itself here is whether the PS4, which is undeniably the more powerful console, has enough oomph under the hood to run all this, render at twice the resolution and still present an immediately noticeable jump in graphics quality. If I go by what I've managed to observe from the E3 showings I can only answer with a reserved "Sort of". While all first party games featured graphics that would have been impossible to replicate faithfully on the PS3, only Infamous: Second Son gave me that chills down my spine: "T-this is impossible... Next Gen is here motherfuckers!" feeling sought-after going into E3.
The PS4 GPU is not a GTX680/770, the golden standard used by technical demos in recent times. Some corners will have to be cut to pump out truly mind blowing visuals. On the other hand I wouldn't want the eternal quest of satisfying the graphics whore in all of us to hamper gameplay experience. I'd much rather have Drive Club launch with really good graphics and offer fully dynamic driving conditions than try to emulate the immaculate "wax museum pretty" of Forza 5 with static conditions. It's up to developers to learn where to cut corners in order to present both aspects in a single package. I've got a feeling we are eventually going to experience this on both consoles, maybe not at launch, but definitely in the following years.
. But we'll have to wait and see.
