GLM-5.2 vs Claude Opus

techstackups.com · 2 months ago · 39 ● 3 sources

GLM-5.2, an open-weights model from Z.ai, was benchmarked against Claude Opus 4.8 in a head-to-head test building a 3D platformer game in raw WebGL from scratch. GLM-5.2 took 1 hour 10 minutes and cost $5.39, while Opus finished in 33 minutes and cost approximately $21.92. Opus shipped a cleaner, more correct game with proper textures and working mechanics, while GLM-5.2's game had missing textures, a backwards-facing character, and non-functional hazards—partly because GLM-5.2 cannot read images and thus failed to catch visual problems during verification, whereas Opus's multimodal capabilities let it inspect screenshots and fix issues before shipping.