I'm surprised there's been no mention of Crysis. This was a game whose entire popularity was largely based around "unnaturally pretty, will burn a hole in your computer"; to the extent that it became a rather mainstream GPU benchmarking metric.

I'm honestly surprised there's as much of a debate over this, the breakdown always seemed rather clear to me: That while there are "great games" that "serious gamers"(tm) love (I'm personally a massive SS2 fan, play it to this day) we are in the vast minority and the Next Gen race has been almost entirely about throwing increasingly flashy presentation-oriented features at core game mechanics that are known to be successful.