They Made Something Unreal
So I love hate to id Software and Epic Games because they make tech demos and not actual games. That remains unchanged really. Gears of War was by far a tech demo and so was pretty much every Unreal release. In fact, when they tried their hand at making games with yearly UT releases they failed horribly and decided to go back to making tech demos.
What I can't hate on Epic Games for is that although they only make tech demos, their tech is good. The Unreal 3 engine is pretty. It's very pretty. You may want to reference Crysis here and be like "that's pretty." No, Crysis is true beauty, Unreal 3 is just pretty.
Crysis is also, I want to remind everyone, a piece of trash engine. The game had bugs and no rig to date can break 60 FPS. Maxing out the settings on Crysis renders the game unplayable even with CrossFire 3870 X2s. Now if 4 GPUs can't take care of business, nothing can.
Now I haven't been up to date on the performance of the new GeForce 9-series but I'm pretty confident Crysis is still a behemoth engine that can't be contained. With that said, it's unreasonable to use Crysis for much of anything. Very few people will be able to play a FPS on it, much less an RTS or heaven-forbid a MMO (one of which is currently under development with that engine).
Unreal 3 plays on mobile Radeon X1600s pretty decent (everything on low) and butter smooth on my 8800GTs (G62) with the setting on high. Now of developers would continue to take the Unreal Engine and make awesome titles like Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 I could be pleased with at least a small portion of the modern professional gaming industry.