an unscientific qwen 3.8 flash next and glm 5.3 flash comparison

I stole the reference image from a recent post on r/stablediffusion, and then asked both qwen 3.8 flash next (q4 K XL) and GLM flash (oQ4e MLX) to choose try to reproduce it into a "video game or tech demo" as closely as possible, iterating over a period of (up to) about an hour and a half each.

Overall GLM flash was overall much closer to the reference image in terms of scale, though still a ways off in terms of the size of the humans. It was also more detailed from the getgo. BUT I thought this could be a result of the models choosing different approaches: without being told one way or the other, qwen wrote a new software renderer from scratch while vs. glm chose to use Canvas 2D.

So I asked GLM to make its creation animated (1st gif/4th image above). I had to tell it to correct a browser console error but it made a playable pixel art "walking simulator" in 238k tokens (and probably about 2 hours total) from the reference image, and showed no sign of stopping adding details and making improvements

Overall I would give a slight edge to GLM for instruction following as I emphasized visual similarity in my prompt much more than interactivity and it did a far better job of following the reference image.

Points to qwen for making nicely animated pixel art city in only 10 minutes and 80k tokens on rtx pro 6000 and unsloth gguf.

However qwen ignored or failed to understand the the instruction "If there is possible improvement along the axis defined by the goal, continue until there is none" as it was apparently satisfied with its work. In another run I did with a slightly different instruction it continued to iterate for about 80 minutes until I stopped it, but it still didn't resemble the reference image very closely (but was another cute animated pixel art city).

Quants: GLM 5.3 Flash oQ4e MLX, Qwen 3.8 Flash Next Q4_K_XL