# Gemma 3 12B vs Mercury

> Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 32.1 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gemma-3-12b-vs-mercury
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 8

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Gemma 3 12B scores higher in 4 categories and Mercury in 2 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Mercury leads 38.7 to 31.7.
- Gemma 3 12B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 32.1 | 37.6 |
| Rank | 262 | 199 |
| Context | 131K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.05 | — |
| Output $/M | $0.15 | — |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Gemma 3 12B: 31.7 (#280)
- Mercury: 38.7 (#170)

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1281 | 1322 |
| SciCode | 17.4% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Gemma 3 12B: 25.5 (#108)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 30.4% | — |

## Reasoning

- Gemma 3 12B: 15.7 (#313)
- Mercury: 17.5 (#293)

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1309 | 1285 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 21.6% |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| DTBench | 48.8% | — |
| LMCA | 4.5% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 123.5 | — |

## Math

- Gemma 3 12B: 22.3 (#279)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 16.7% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1307 | — |

## Knowledge

- Gemma 3 12B: 26.5 (#257)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 39.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 4.4% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1248 | — |

## Multimodal

- Gemma 3 12B: —
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| MindCube | 46.7% | — |

## Multilingual

- Gemma 3 12B: 45.7 (#165)
- Mercury: 41.6 (#206)

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1318 | 1260 |
| LMArena German | 1370 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1335 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Gemma 3 12B: 68.6 (#186)
- Mercury: 65.2 (#224)

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1299 | 1239 |

## Long Context

- Gemma 3 12B: 40.0 (#162)
- Mercury: 38.4 (#198)

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1317 | 1266 |

## Writing & Preference

- Gemma 3 12B: 47.5 (#209)
- Mercury: 46.2 (#221)

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1334 | 1282 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1331 | 1191 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1334 | 1282 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1126 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Gemma 3 12B better than Mercury?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 32.1 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Gemma 3 12B or Mercury better for coding?

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 31.7 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Gemma 3 12B and Mercury share?

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Gemma 3 12B has 24 scored results on Noometry and Mercury has 9.