this is an ongoing and interesting debate that is widespread throughout the gaming community. What do you guys think is the better engine, Half-Life 2's Source or Doom 3's engine?
Dont just post your favorite, give a reason why one is better than the other.

my opinion is the physics in HL2 are great, however, that is not the Source engine, that is the integrated Havok physics engine. The two work great together. However, when it comes to pure graphics, I think that both have their unique ups and downs. What Doom 3 does extremely well is bumpmapping. While Source does this well too, Doom 3 can handle significantly more highly bumpmapped textures than HL2. The Doom 3 engine is extremely good at rendoring indoor environments because of its focus on architecture and close up detail/bumpmapping. HL2 has great bumpmapping, but it also uses a lot of basic textures such as ground textures.
Doom 3's capability in the outdoor graphics is actually unknown. ID did not render any outdoor environments other than the barren Mars surface, which looked very good. I would be interested in seeing how a forest would look in doom 3. HL2's biggest graphical disapointment to me was the lack of detail in foliage and in basic textures.

note: This is not a Half-Life 2 vs Doom 3 discussion, it is about the flexibility/capability of these game's respective engines.

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I agree wif you about the Source engine. I think it is better than Doom 3. this is mainly because the Source engine uses lesser system resources than Doom 3 's engine and this is very very important to a game engine. Furthermore, the source engine produces very good graphics and as said above, the phyics are very accuratly calculated too. I don't tihnk any other game engine has ever came close to this.....

-Shackman

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You should also add a vs CryEngine to the end of the title there.

As you put, they all have their ups and downs. The D3 engine provides some amazing graphics, and comes from the experts at Id Software. They pretty much wrote the book for FPS games.
What I liked about the source was the detail put into each character. The facial expressions were very well done as well as the ragdoll effects.
The CryEngine renders the best environment I have seen in a computer game yet. The beaches, jungle, foliage, dense trees, extremely far viewing range. This engine is just amazing.
Overall I don't have a favorite though. They are all good in their own area and diversity is good, makes for some original and fun gaming experience. Kudos to those who spend time and effort to bring this technology to us.

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Cry engine is amizing, sure you have to have the 1.3 patch to get the most out of it and a NVIDIA 6 series or new ATI card to power then thing, but the jungle detail and the water is amazing, mind you the water efects in Source do look good. on midrange cards the source engine looks better because it is easier on resoruces etc, but if you are like me and have a overclocked 6600GT (1ghz RAM ) then i beleive the Cry Engine does a superior job of rendering outdoor environments. sure Doom 3 has some fancy bumpmapping, but its outdoor rending is unproven

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I personally think the source engine is better. It has been in development since the Hl1:CS release, and Doom3 is just the same, BUT.. source has a obviously superior physics engine and is a tougher, high-security, protected source code. ( Source code, Source engine, get it? hehe )

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im also guessing that since ATI cards run Source better than Nvidia cards that it would not take a very powerful ATI car to run Source respectfully

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