Image Battle

Summary for Surreal & Creative Prompts

This category proved to be a significant differentiator between models that simply render keywords and those that understand conceptual relationships. While most models excelled at texture-heavy tasks like the Tiny Planet Cake, high-concept prompts revealed stark differences in capability.

🏆 Top Performers

• Seedream 4.0: The most consistent performer, achieving a perfect 10/10 on the Snail City Shell and near-perfect scores on complex compositing tasks.
• Midjourney v7: Demonstrated superior conceptual understanding, being the only model to truly ace the difficult Musical Note Skyline prompt with a score of 9/10.
• ChatGPT 4o: Dominated in product-style realism, scoring a 10/10 on the Avocado Armchair.

📉 Key Trends

• The "Shape" struggle: Most models failed to make a skyline form a shape, opting instead to place musical notes over a skyline.
• Gibberish Penalties: High-fidelity models like Flux 2 Pro and DALL-E 3 lost points due to unprompted gibberish text in the Steampunk Robot and Galaxy Waterfall images.
• Texture Mastery: Food and nature textures (cake, snail, mushrooms) are now nearly solved problems, with average scores consistently above 8.

Deep Dive: Patterns & Insights

In the realm of surrealism, technical rendering capability is insufficient without semantic understanding. The data reveals a clear divide between "Assemblers" (models that paste elements together) and "Integrators" (models that blend concepts).

🎨 The Conceptual Ceiling

The prompt Musical Note Skyline acted as the ultimate filter. The prompt asked for a skyline that forms the shape of musical notes.

• The Failures: Models like MiniMax Image-01 (Score: 3) and Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra (Score: 4) treated the prompt literally, pasting clip-art notes on top of a city.
• The Successes: Midjourney v7 (Score: 9) and Reve Image (Halfmoon) (Score: 8) physically warped the architecture to create the shapes, demonstrating a much higher level of prompt adherence and abstraction capability.

👁️ Composition Preservation vs. Style Transfer

The Cyberpunk Mona Lisa prompt tested the ability to maintain a specific composition while changing the subject.

• Seedream 4.0 and Reve Image (Halfmoon) excelled here (Score: 9), perfectly keeping the pose while replacing skin with porcelain and mechanics.
• Conversely, Z-Image Turbo failed completely (Score: 2), merely applying a filter rather than reimagining the subject.

🐌 Integration of Scales

For the Snail City Shell, the challenge was blending macro biology with miniature architecture.

• Imagen 3.0 and Seedream 4.0 achieved 10/10, creating seamless "snow globe" effects where the glass/shell texture refracted the city inside.
• Lower scoring models often rendered the city as a flat texture map pasted onto the shell surface, lacking depth.

Best Models by Use Case

Depending on your creative goal, different models offer distinct advantages in the surreal category:

🛍️ Commercial & Product Design

• Best Choice: ChatGPT 4o & Seedream 3.0
• Why: These models excelled at the Avocado Armchair and Tiny Planet Cake. They produce clean, commercial-ready images with perfect studio lighting and logical construction, avoiding the "messy" artistic flair that can distract in product concepts.

🎨 Abstract & Symbolic Art

• Best Choice: Midjourney v7
• Why: It was the clear winner for the Musical Note Skyline and Floating Library. If you need a model to understand a metaphor or a shape constraint (e.g., "X made of Y"), this is the most reliable option.

🎬 Cinematic & Fantasy Concepts

• Best Choice: Seedream 4.0 & Nano Banana Pro
• Why: Nano Banana Pro was a surprise standout, scoring a 10/10 on the Galaxy Waterfall. Both models handle complex lighting and atmospheric depth exceptionally well, making them ideal for storyboarding or concept art like the Mushroom Forest.

⚙️ Detailed Macro & Texture

• Best Choice: Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra
• Why: Despite struggling with abstract concepts, it scored a 9/10 on the Steampunk Robot. It generates incredibly crisp mechanical details (gears, brass, copper), making it perfect for subjects where intricate texture is more important than surreal logic.