Considering halo 3 has another year in development (and with gears about to go gold any day now), I wouldnt really put too much weight on his comment.
Yes, as Bungie's own updates have noted that even recently most MP maps were completely bare (some even lacking textures).
Another consideration is game style. GOW and Halo are polar opposites in terms of gameplay. Halo is pretty quick, open ended in MP, with vehicles. GOW is close quarter, pop and shoot, tactical combat. GOW is max 4v4, whereas Halo can be assumed to at least have 16, and maybe more -- plus 4 player split screen if past versions hold true. And based on the technology Bungie has shown, 13 mile view distances of real geometry and their comments about "other places" for their geometry budget indicate that Halo, in design, is different. And of course there are technical differences (Halo uses MSAA).
Typically the press waits to comment/compare closed door game demos as the obvious "still early in development" but the gaming press, in general, tends to be on the fanatical/tabloid because of the market (fanbois) and hype/dirt sells well. Of course this could mean the guy is just so in love with Gears of War that everything will pale for years... part of it could very well be art. Gears has a dirty, detailed design that may appeal to some and not to others.
Personally I think Halo needs some design changes to make the next gen jump, specifically in art. The art worked well for the Xbox1 and NV2A. Bright colors, stylistic boxy characters, etc don't pair well with where technology has gone (see: DoA4, which is technically much better than DoA3 but the art is a major bottleneck). The Halo Wars CGI is a good idea of where I personally would like to see Halo go, but that may be out of reach technically to fake to any reasonable degree.
Anyhow, until we see both games nearer completion it is hard to say, but any comparison will need to consider the number of players, wap size, vehicles, etc...
i was under the impression it wasnt really initially designed for multicore thus wasnt the best choice for xb360 + certainly not for the ps3
You probably misunderstood, but UE3 is multithreaded in the renderer now and in the past my understanding was that certain APIs like Novodex or Sound could be threaded. The big bummer with the 360 is the GPU where you have tiling and the ROPs are designed for full speed logic with MSAA (16 Z samples per clock w/o MSAA, 64 with 4xMSAA) and bandwidth to feed such, but UE3, as it isn't targetting MSAA, goes another route. Seeing as RSX is NV47 based there is no reason, on the graphical side, that UE3 should't do great. UE3 was first showcased on NV40 hardware and later SLI (e.g. E3 2005 GOW demo was 6800GT SLI). Epic is a NV partner as well, and with the significant NV install based in PC gamers machines there is no reason to think UE3 wouldn't do well on the PS3. Especially if the logic of some that UE3 isn't pushing physics, AI, etc and is mainly a GPU-graphics centered solution
