Noometry

Model comparison

Mercury 2 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Mercury 2 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (38.8 vs 39.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

Last verified . 11 shared benchmarks.

Mercury 2 Inception

38.8

Rank #167 Confirmed

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning NVIDIA

39.3

Rank #156 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 4 categories and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning in 3 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in coding, where Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads 39.6 to 33.2.
  • Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper at $0.06 / $0.16 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $0.75 for Mercury 2.
  • Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
  • Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Mercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
ProviderInceptionNVIDIA
Noometry Index38.839.3
Released2026-02-202026-08-11
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window128K262K
Max output50K262K
Input $ / M tokens$0.25$0.06
Output $ / M tokens$0.75$0.16
Results tracked1718

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Category by category

Coding Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads

Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.6 (#143)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Coding13911370
LMArena WebDev1170—
SciCode38.7%—
WeirdML43.2%—
ALE-Bench785.58—

Reasoning Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads

Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 25.7 (#128)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Hard Prompts13621335
CritPt0.8%—

Math Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 34.7 (#156)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Math—1355

Knowledge Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads

Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 36.9 (#154)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Expert13581354
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.3%—

Multilingual Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 44.0 (#175)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Non-English13311292
LMArena Chinese14161356
LMArena Russian13031257
LMArena French—1369
LMArena German—1280
LMArena Japanese—1213
LMArena Korean—1233
LMArena Spanish—1321

Instruction Following Too close to call

Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 69.8 (#166)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Instruction Following13281317

Long Context Too close to call

Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.9 (#160)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Longer Query13291312

Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151), Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 48.5 (#198)

BenchmarkMercury 2Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
LMArena Text13551324
LMArena Creative Writing12891254
LMArena Multi-Turn13581327
EQ-Bench Creative Writing—1280

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury 2 better than Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Mercury 2 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (38.8 vs 39.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper. It lists at $0.06 per million input tokens and $0.16 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.

Is Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better for coding?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.6 versus 33.2 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning does, with 262K tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning share?

11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has 18.

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