Claude Opus 5 (Max) vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5 (Max) 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 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 5 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 50.80
Total cost: $7275

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

Intelligence: 22.90
Total cost: $596

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5 (Max) scores 27.9 points higher (50.8 vs 22.9) but costs 12× as much to run the benchmark ($7275 vs $596; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5 (Max) when you need intelligence above 22.9, and Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) when 22.9 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 5 (Max)	Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	50.8	22.9	−54.9% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 54.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$7,274.74	$596.33	−91.8% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 91.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	85.86s	15.27s	−82.2% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 82.2% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$5.00 / $25.0	$0.60 / $2.70
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5 (Max): 54.9% less intelligence, 91.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 82.2% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5 (Max): what beats it Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5 (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 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 (Max)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/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill