Jarred, just out of sheer curiosity: from what you've seen so far, which game would you consider as the best looking ever? Would Alan Wake II make it into your personal Top-5?
It's a big can of worms to open up. Alan Wake 2 has some impressive visuals, and the full path tracing with Ray Reconstruction does look better than the default rendering. It's also incredibly taxing on your GPU, though. Off hand, yes, I think it's probably in the current top five, but even with all settings maxed out, there are aspects that don't impress me too much. Also, running it without ray tracing at all doesn't look that much worse, and it's mostly the reflections that stand out as being inferior when DXR is turned off.
Cyberpunk 2077 (with path tracing) probably makes the top five as well, but with a lot more caveats. There are areas of the game that look pretty amazing, and other aspects — like the very generic looking NPCs — that fall short.
Both of those games also have the same problem of style (i.e. graphics) over substance (gameplay). I did finish CP77, and it was okay, but it wasn't amazing. I have not finished AW2, and given my history with games, there's a very good chance I never will. (I only finish probably 1% of all games that I own these days.)
The games that really stick with me are less about whether the graphics are amazing and more about whether the game is great. Half-Life / HL2 easily stand out in my memory as being awesome experiences for their time, but the graphics were merely good. Portal / Portal 2 were also incredibly clever and fun for their time. The Mass Effect games certainly didn't blaze new trails graphically but had story and characters that stick in my memory (not so much ME3, though... and certainly not ME:Andromeda.)
I don't know that I'd say Doom Eternal is one of the top five best looking games, but it definitely warrants a mention for having good graphics that run slicker than snot. If ever there were a case to be made that Vulkan is probably more efficient than DirectX 12, Doom Eternal is a poster child for those claims.
To name a few other graphically impressive games: any recent Assassin's Creed. They all do a lot of pretty amazing world building, almost too much stuff going on. They're not perfect, they don't have ray tracing (not that they need to have it), but there are almost always some impressive vistas. Far Cry 5 and 6 as well as Watch Dogs Legion are like that as well, for all the same reasons — they basically feel like the standard Ubi template.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has some great segments for sure and is often visually impressive. Control has some great ray tracing and certain aspects of the visuals are great, though you're also running around a shifting office space and so that makes it less impressive on the whole. Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Hitman 3 all sort of fall into the same range as the Ubi games mentioned above: not universally amazing looking, but definitely some nicer sequences.
The one Clockwork level in Dishonored 2 still stands out as an amazing visual experience. MS Flight Simulator also has some visually impressive aspects. Get too close and the veneer fails, but it's fun to go try flying over your house (and then spotting the errors in the maps). Spider-Man (Remastered and Miles Morales) both have some nice visuals, as does A Plague Tale: Requiem. I thought the RT effects were more noticeable and looked better in SM: Remastered than in Miles Morales, though.
I finished The Ascent last year, with all the DXR eye candy running, and it was pretty fun — the RT wasn't strictly necessary, but hey, I have a 4090 available. It felt more sci-fi than cyberpunk, though, which was disappointing to me (I'm a big cyberpunk fan — as in, the genre, not the game). The Last of Us Part 1 has some nice visuals, so does Dying Light 2 (very demanding with all the RT effects).
Anyway, that's just a random list of games I remember being impressed with for various reasons, not all of them graphics related. I'm still looking for the full path tracing experience that makes me say, "Hell yeah! This is what I've been missing!" The more time passes, the more I wonder if that will ever happen. Alan Wake 2 didn't do it, CP77 didn't do it — though both look good. Instead of a massive leap in visual fidelity, we keep getting modest improvements at best.
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