What's great? Mountains have very blurry textures. Looks like motorstorm with better lighting and worse textures.
That is like saying, "What is so great about Killzone 2? Dark filters and pixelated dynamic shadows? Looks like Fear with more lights and worse AI." The extremisms don't tell us much; the nuances and details in between the extremes tell us more about the total package.
For Rage, it is a racing game. While 1 texel per inch (if that is what they are aiming for, I dunno, but it
seems reasonable based on some of the numbers given) isn't super high, the goal from id Tech 5 is as much performance and texture uniqueness. e.g. Instead of bland repetitive tiling like Motorstorm (which has some really, really bad texturing and places where they are lucky to have a texel per foot, so texturing is a real hit or miss there for me) with some stamped tiles for diversity, id Tech 5 is offering a unique palette.
I am not gagga over id Tech 5, but to be fair they are multiplatform and run on 4 platforms, run at 60Hz, takes the source material and automatically ports it to all 4 versions, and has some nice post processing. The rendering engine, overall, looks decent (lighting and shadowing appeared to be decent).
Also, PC graphics cards may have "technical advancements" and some games will use this but console graphics will always have many effects that are not possible on PC cards because developer can custom design software with consoles but cannot on PC
More than one way to skin a cat. The high end PC GPUs have more power right now, so what they may lack in elegance can often be accomplished with brute strength. A 8800GTX is gonna crush RSX (essentially a slower clocked 7900GTX with fewer ROPs and less memory bandwidth). So you can do some nice stuff with Cell for graphics (due to necessity in some cases), in many cases an 8800GTX could do those things another way because it is more flexible and a lot faster. And we are not even talking about IQ levels and new formats that these new GPUs support.
PC they are limited to API and sometimes have to support very high resolutions, full AA, high anisotropic filtering, etc, no?. Console they have no limits.
I will excuse these comments because I don't think you PC game much. A number of PC games don't even support MSAA--UE3 doesn't and a hoard of PC games are using it. AF? I have only played a couple games that even have it enabled by default. Resolution? I cannot think of a single game that defaults to over 1024x768 (mind you I don't play every game).
The Steam results show a lot of PC gamers use aged hardware. Your perception of PC gamers, and PC games, is skewed. PC games, at least new high profile ones pushing on the hardware, tend to tickle a couple bells and whistles of the new cards, offer "HQ settings" that tend to crush even the nicest GPUs, and then offer a ton of scale back options for older hardware, with target baseline hardware typically ~ 2 years old for most features at modest IQ levels.
PC devs have a lot more leeway than console devs do in terms of release rules. And while PC devs have to deal with APIs and shifting hardware, they can set any cutoff they want. They also can toss features in with the approach, "Get new hardware if you want to use this feature" if it doesn't perform fast enough. Features left on the cutting room floor on consoles get left open for new hardware. There is give an take.