Which is best?
Depends on what kind of game you’re going to make, how much time you have and what resources are available.
Source Engine is very exploitable and because so many people have played with it over the years there are more guides and tweaks around.
Unreal Engine is free which is a big win, plus it’s a great engine that runs on a huge variety of machines.
CryEngine 2 on PC should be cutting edge, but it looks like on consoles it’s toned down quite a bit.
As above, depends on what you want.
Thats CryEngine 3 you mean.
Source Engine is the easiest.
CryEngine 3 looks the best among everything.
Unreal is only for paid experts.
CryEngine 2/3 - high quality graphics, low performance on mid systems, not for masses,
Source - well known, lots of feedback, high performance, perfect for masses,
UE3 - lots of feedback, high performance, many of the newest technologies (visual candy).
imo, ut3 engine has a good feature list(better then source), its free to the public. Its easy to make interesting landscapes. the only beef i have with it is i find it too difficult to make precise maps without making everything models. this could just be me being a noob but its what i found anyway. i had a hard time manipulating brushes aswell. HUGE learning curve which put me off, i plan to invest more time into learning it more because i think the engine is too good to pass up.
source i find almost dated. i wish the brushes had the same texture capabilities as the models do. Imo, the specular maps look too obvious, even at high resolutions.
it lacks parallax and ambient occlusion. (parallax is disabled in the engine but it can be enabled again via modding)
cryengine 2/3? made a map for crysis 1.5 and i hated it. It appears to be a solid engine though, but id still rather learn UDK than learn this.
/opinion
Source supports ambient occlusion.
I love the Unreal Engine. You can get good performance with not so bad visuals and all the other advantages.
Cryengine3 is just the maximum you can get in realtime.
source and AO? since when?
Driver-based AO is “supported”…
Unreal and Cryengine 3 are both more ‘modern’ engines, in want of a better word. Both are more capable of rendering larger environments, but source is a very easy to use engine. Source isn’t a particularly fantastic engine, all things considered, but it has claim to some of the greatest games of all time.
I personally have only one thing to like about the unreal engine, and it’s the “tiledshot” console command
source is garbage nowadays, but since the games don’t demand much from it, it’s okay, while cryengine will always be like the person that shows off his 50 inch penis once in a while
A sample of what Cry Engine 3 can do:
That looks damn realistic even if it’s just ground 'n grass 'n water.
L4D uses a for of ambient occulsion doesn’t it?
Anyway, we’ve had a thread like this already. Just sayin’…
no, not really, it’s only a faked effect in Source.
The only way to enable AO fo HL2 is the driver hack of nv.
btw CryEngine 3 won’t be tweaked down for the PC, only the console versions will have crappier graphics(stuttering shadows etc).
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? 
[EDIT] You only missed an ‘m’ didn’t you? Oh well…
are you serious? ok: the crytek 3 engine is fully direct x11 and even more then just a engine and it is, like id tech 5 and frostbite 2.0, the next gen of game engines. not to compare with dx 9 source and unreal 3. the u3 engine looks better then source because it’s newer.
irony on which engine is the best? the wolfen stein 3d/id tech 1 engine vs. the build engine (duke 3D) vs. crytek 3 engine? irony off …
The source graphics engine initially dazzled us with Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and Half-Life 2. The Source engine is the best.
“Best” is not simply limited to ‘best tech.’
In fact, having a discussion about the best engine is fairly irrelevant without a decent topic to discuss(as in, if someone was interested in making a game) as certain engines suit games better than others. Do you really think that HL2 would be better on Cryengine 3? Likewise, do you think Bioshock would be better on Source? Or Crysis on Unreal?
Source is really adaptive, and it has a lot more potential than Valve displays. Have you guys seen the new Dear Esther?
Yes, I don’t see how that is adaptive in engine terms however. In fact, it is really easy to do(as in, no engine modification is necessary) the maps are brilliantly designed though, and it surely shows what Source mappers can do, it doesn’t mean the engine is adaptive.
There are better examples, such as that game Flipside, which shows the diversity of Source better than a FPS could.