Agreed.
The lighting effects and dynamic fluid surfaces were great in FEAR, but the texture quality and level design weren't anything special.
Prey is okay, probably the best (graphically) of the Doom3 engine games. But I found the gameplay somewhat dull and repetative after a while.
The graphics in stalker are very good in places, if you can stand the bugs, crashes and intermittant poor performance. Overall, I would say take a look at HL2:episode1. It's getting on a bit now, but it should run perfectly at maximum and with the HDR lighting it looks great in places.
The next round of "killer graphics" games - such as Crysis, UT3, bioshock, Alan Wake etc are due 'soon', but keep getting pushed back. These should knock all existing games out of the water.