Last gen Sony has Killzone and MS had Ryse, two games I have zero desire to ever actually play, but which did a great job of showing what the consoles can do. The prevalence of cross-gen stuff this gen has made it so it feels like that hasn't really happened. The only purely next-gen game we've gotten significant gameplay from is Ratchet, which looks great, and I can definitely see some complexity in the reflections that looks like it couldn't previously have been done, as well as the snappy loads (though it's a little disappointing the portals have to take you to the warp zone for a second or two before the new area, instead of literally being able to look through the portal into another world and step back and forth through it instantly), but less realistic styles never show off graphics as well.
But we may just be at a point of diminishing returns where it gets harder and hard to wow with this stuff. 4K is nice, but isn't the eye-opener that the first wave of HD was. Ray-tracing is great, but devs had gotten really good at faking lighting so it's not as mind-blowing as it could be. Character models and environments will look better (as evidenced by that Horizon trailer) but Horizon 1 already looked really good, so it feels like less of a leap. It's not like the first time you saw that Killzone trailer and immediately knew a PS3 could never have rendered that glass skyscraper, or when you saw Ryse and knew that a 360 couldn't have modeled armor or faces like that. It's way harder to point to stuff now and immediately feel certain that was previously impossible, at least not for a layman who can't immediately spot what rendering technique is being used.
