Model comparison
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs o4-mini
o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 40.0 on the Noometry Index. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs 22× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 17 shared benchmarks.
NVIDIASummary
- They share 17 benchmarks with published results for both. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scores higher in 1 category and o4-mini in 7 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where o4-mini leads 43.6 to 37.5.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.20 per million input/output tokens, against $1.10 / $4.40 for o4-mini.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 200K.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | NVIDIA | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 40.0 | 41.6 |
| Released | 2026-08-11 | 2025-04-16 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | 262K | 200K |
| Max output | 262K | 100K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.05 | $1.10 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.20 | $4.40 |
| Results tracked | 18 | 60 |
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Category by category
Coding Too close to call
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 40.4 (#141), o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1375 | 1368 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| GSO | — | 3.6% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.6% |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 826.17 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: —, o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |
Reasoning Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 26.8 (#127), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1337 | 1351 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.1% |
| SimpleBench | — | 38.7% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 58.7% |
| CritPt | — | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 26% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| DTBench | — | 77.6% |
| LMCA | — | 26.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 145.64 |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.8 |
Math o4-mini leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 37.5 (#155), o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1359 | 1389 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 4.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 81.7% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |
Knowledge o4-mini leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 37.5 (#154), o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1356 | 1343 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 79.6% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 19.6% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 18.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |
Multimodal Not comparable
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: —, o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |
Multilingual o4-mini leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 44.0 (#180), o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1295 | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1359 | 1354 |
| LMArena French | 1366 | 1364 |
| LMArena German | 1282 | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1206 | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | 1238 | 1312 |
| LMArena Russian | 1253 | 1334 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1345 | 1347 |
Instruction Following o4-mini leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 69.6 (#170), o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1318 | 1321 |
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |
Long Context o4-mini leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.9 (#165), o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1314 | 1315 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |
Writing & Preference o4-mini leads
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 48.5 (#201), o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)
| Benchmark | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1327 | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1254 | 1294 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1328 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1280 | — |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better than o4-mini?
o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 40.0 on the Noometry Index. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs 22× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning or o4-mini?
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper. It lists at $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens; o4-mini lists at $1.10 and $4.40.
Is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning or o4-mini better for coding?
They score almost the same on coding (40.4 vs 40.9); test both on your own repository before choosing.
Which has the bigger context window?
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning does, with 262K tokens against 200K.
How many benchmarks do Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and o4-mini share?
17 benchmarks have published results for both models. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has 18 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.