basically it is the next big thing according to me after Doom3, Far cry also has a really nice looking DirectX Engine, but an engine isn't only about the Graphics & Looks, it has to incorporate a lot more things
Far cry engine was better in looks but as a software it was really bad, extremely high memory requirments, insane
Doom 3 eninge is very flexible
I have all the videos of STALKER, the X-Ray engine is quite good looking, I remember the developement started at DX8.1 but now it's compleate DirectX 9c.
I hope that the engine is also flexible like Doom3, not like HL2 which favors ATI better then NVIDIA, I mean tell me, if NVIDIA cards are so bad in DX 9 then Y are the games like Far Cry etc perform better in NVIDIA then ATI, even they have disabled theDX9 path for FX cards, what the hell, does FX really perform better then ATI in DX9 & to hide it they had to close the path for FX cards