It was some ND interview I read. A cursory 5 AM google search isn't revealing anything right away, though, sorry. I remember linking it on GAF several months ago. Basically, as I remember it, people were claiming that the water in Uncharted 3 was dynamic, when in truth, it was calculated dynamically in Maya or something, then baked into the game (or whatever the technical term is). It's just an animation, really.
There was some other interesting stuff I remember reading too, like how what they did with the sand is really simple, and how the cutscenes, most of which are all pre-rendered rather than in-engine, use higher-resolution assets to create the illusion that the game's characters look better than they do in gameplay.
From a pure: "we are pushing AA/dynamic lighting/particles/X Polygons/etc," my understanding is that ND is good, but surpassed by many others. I'ma have to go refresh myself on the tech stuff on Uncharted 3, but I don't remember reading that they were doing anything particularly "how the fuck did they do that?"
Carmack's made a similar statement regarding Rage. Both platforms had advantages and disadvantages. Whether or not Crytek felt as he did (360's disadvantages weren't as bad as the PS3's), I don't know. I didn't play Crysis 2 on either console.
I'd be interested in seeing something that talks about the differences between the various lighting solutions, draw distances, texture quality, filtering, particles, etc used in both games.
