Model comparison
Gemma 3 12B vs StarCoder 2 15B
Gemma 3 12B has enough public results to be ranked (#255); StarCoder 2 15B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.
Last verified . 1 shared benchmarks.
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NVIDIASummary
- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. Gemma 3 12B scores higher in 0 categories and StarCoder 2 15B in 1 category; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where StarCoder 2 15B leads 36.0 to 31.2.
Side by side
| Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | NVIDIA | |
| Noometry Index | 31.8 | 37.5 |
| Released | 2025-03-12 | 2024-02-20 |
| Weights | Open | Open |
| Context window | 131K | — |
| Max output | 8K | — |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.05 | — |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.15 | — |
| Results tracked | 24 | 7 |
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Category by category
Coding StarCoder 2 15B leads
Gemma 3 12B: 31.2 (#276), StarCoder 2 15B: 36.0
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 17.4% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1281 | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 38.4% |
| HumanEval+ | — | 37.8% |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 25.3 (#101), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 30.4% | — |
Reasoning Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 15.2 (#307), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 123.49 | 104.61 |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1309 | — |
| DTBench | 48.8% | — |
| LMCA | 4.5% | — |
| WinoGrande | — | 64.3% |
Math Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 21.0 (#273), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 16.7% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1307 | — |
| GSM8K | — | 57.7% |
Knowledge Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 26.5 (#250), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 39.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 4.4% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1248 | — |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 47.2% |
| MMLU | — | 64.1% |
Multimodal Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: —, StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| MindCube | 46.7% | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 45.9 (#160), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1318 | — |
| LMArena German | 1370 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1335 | — |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 68.8 (#179), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1299 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 40.0 (#157), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1317 | — |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 47.7 (#205), StarCoder 2 15B: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1334 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1331 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1126 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1334 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Gemma 3 12B better than StarCoder 2 15B?
Gemma 3 12B has enough public results to be ranked (#255); StarCoder 2 15B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.
Is Gemma 3 12B or StarCoder 2 15B better for coding?
StarCoder 2 15B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.0 versus 31.2 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Gemma 3 12B and StarCoder 2 15B share?
1 benchmark has published results for both models. Gemma 3 12B has 24 scored results on Noometry and StarCoder 2 15B has 7.