Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (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 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 42.30
Total cost: $860

NVIDIANemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 22.90
Total cost: $596

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) scores 19.4 points higher (42.3 vs 22.9) but costs 1.4× as much to run the benchmark ($860 vs $596; both premium class). Pick Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning).

Metric	Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)	Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	42.3	22.9	−45.9% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 45.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$860.33	$596.33	−30.7% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 30.7% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	13.19s	14.75s	+11.8% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 11.8% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$4.00 / $20.0	$0.60 / $2.70
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback): 45.9% less intelligence, 30.7% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 11.8% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback): what beats it Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.
Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.

Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (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-5-5-low/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-low/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill