The lighting in Halo 4 is much better than Halo 3, HDR aside.
That's extremely debatable.
For environmental lighting and shadowing, both games have their strengths.
Halo 4 provides sharper-looking shadowing, in two ways; environment shadows occasionally have hard (albeit disgustingly dithered) shadows, and shadows from dynamic objects use some funky clamping/interpolation technique to get hard edges (though this is only visible on close inspection, and doesn't really look all that much less weird than plain old shadow map textures displayed as-is). Halo 4 also applies high-frequency shadow maps to the first-person HUD models, though personally I think the implementation looks absolutely bizarre and mostly bad.
Halo 3's core environmental lighting model looks better though, IMO. Objects sit more naturally in their environments (even though Halo 3 seems to deliberately over-light some objects for gameplay reasons, noticeable with enemies in extremely dark areas in ODST), and just plain respond more convincingly to different light environments. For instance, surfaces on UNSC vehicles in Halo 4 look like they're inexplicably absorbing light from some angles.
As for dynamic lighting? Halo 4 seems to support a larger light count, but light for light, Halo 3 completely mops the floor with Halo 4.
Halo 3 supports both pointlights and spotlights, even minor light sources seems to have a pretty complex response (getting a decent diffuse and specular response on appropriate surfaces), and the game makes sure that special surfaces like water get their own neato lighting responses.
Halo 4 only supports extremely basic-looking diffuse point lights. Even Halo 1's dynamic lights (it also supports spotlights and specularity) completely shame Halo 4's.
And shrugging off the HDR like no big deal is a little silly, as it's how Halo 3 is able to nail the visual style that it targets. It's why Halo 3 is able to cleanly support such high-contrast environments, which Bungie
especially took advantage of (perhaps too much advantage of, hehe) with ODST.
Halo 4 uses some high-contrast and super-high-brightness scenes, and the result is a blown-out mess. Bloom in Halo 4 often looks more like a strange fog emanating from an object than an actual lighting effect. Ragnarok looks appallingly overexposed. It's just plain icky; the SpOps version of the Vortex map almost looks like it's supposed to be a whacky dream sequence because the lighting is so harsh for the engine.
GTA 2 came out on the Dreamcast (a cross-gen title), so GTA 2 -> GTA 3 counts.
