gemini 3.7 flash vs deepseek v4 pro 0813 vs muse spark 1.2 – on voxel city dioramas

three models each built three crossy road-style 3d scenes – a construction site, a nyc intersection, a river with a drawbridge – as single self-contained html files

the setup:
@nousresearch's hermes agent cli on @openrouter, three.js skills preloaded, identical prompts per scene

tasks:

1. construction site – tower crane on a working lift loop, paver laying fresh road, roller compacting it behind

2. nyc crossing – four-way intersection with a traffic light state machine, queuing cars, pedestrians crossing on the walk signal

3. river drawbridge – double-leaf bascule that lifts for tall boats, cars queuing at the barriers, animated water

every scene: @threejs r185, box geometry only, a locked 20-color palette, four camera presets, and a day/night mode with bloom. one file, no build step, no assets

models: @googledeepmind gemini 3.7 flash, @deepseek_ai v4 pro 0813, @aiatmeta muse spark 1.2

muse and gemini finished every scene in two to three minutes. deepseek took 15 to 41 minutes per scene

- build time, all three scenes
#1 gemini 3.7 flash – 6m 43s
#2 muse spark 1.2 – 7m 20s
#3 deepseek v4 pro – 91m 25s

- total tokens
#1 muse spark 1.2 – 440,279
#2 gemini 3.7 flash – 713,855
#3 deepseek v4 pro – 20,957,568

- total price
#1 muse spark 1.2 – $0.53
#2 gemini 3.7 flash – $0.56
#3 deepseek v4 pro – $4.57

- agent calls across the three builds
#1 muse spark 1.2 – 12
#2 gemini 3.7 flash – 18
#3 deepseek v4 pro – 143

observations:

• muse won two of the three scenes on looks with the smallest files in the test – 887 to 1,042 lines against gemini's 1,934 to 2,377. cheapest, fastest to a good frame, and shortest turned out to be the same column

• deepseek burned 20.96m tokens – 29x gemini, 48x muse – across 143 agent calls. prompt caching is the only reason that cost $4.57: the cache discount absorbed roughly $30 of resent context

• gemini was the only model whose files needed zero fixes to render – and the only one whose night mode is cosmetic. the sky never darkens and one camera button does nothing. clean code for a scene it never looked at

watch the full test via link