Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) by Anthropic or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 4.8 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 41.80
Total cost: $6874

NVIDIANemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 12.80
Total cost: $1319

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) scores 29.0 points higher (41.8 vs 12.8) but costs 5.2× as much to run the benchmark ($6874 vs $1319; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) when you need intelligence above 12.8, and Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) when 12.8 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 4.8 (Max)	Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	41.8	12.8	−69.4% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 69.4% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$6,873.86	$1,318.62	−80.8% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 80.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	48.05s	16.82s	−65.0% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 65.0% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$5.00 / $25.0	$0.30 / $0.90
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 4.8 (Max): 69.4% less intelligence, 80.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 65.0% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 4.8 (Max): what beats it Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

Claude Opus 4.8 (Max)Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-4-8/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-4-8/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill