# Mercury vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

> Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.0 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-vs-nemotron-3-5-lightning
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 8

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 0 categories and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning in 6 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads 26.8 to 17.5.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 37.6 | 40.0 |
| Rank | 199 | 155 |
| Context | — | 262K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.20 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury: 38.7 (#170)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 40.4 (#141)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1322 | 1375 |

## Reasoning

- Mercury: 17.5 (#293)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 26.8 (#127)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1285 | 1337 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 21.6% | — |

## Math

- Mercury: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 37.5 (#155)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1359 |

## Knowledge

- Mercury: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 37.5 (#154)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | — | 1356 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury: 41.6 (#206)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 44.0 (#180)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1260 | 1295 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1359 |
| LMArena French | — | 1366 |
| LMArena German | — | 1282 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1206 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1238 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1253 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1345 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury: 65.2 (#224)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 69.6 (#170)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1239 | 1318 |

## Long Context

- Mercury: 38.4 (#198)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.9 (#165)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1266 | 1314 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury: 46.2 (#221)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 48.5 (#201)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1282 | 1327 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1191 | 1254 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1282 | 1328 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1280 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury better than Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.0 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Mercury or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better for coding?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.4 versus 38.7 in the Noometry coding category.

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

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has 18.