GPT-5.6 Luna (Max) vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: GPT-5.6 Luna (Max) by OpenAI or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

OpenAIGPT-5.6 Luna (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 37.30
Total cost: $320

NVIDIANVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $63.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GPT-5.6 Luna (Max) scores 28.4 points higher (37.3 vs 8.9) but costs 5.0× as much to run the benchmark ($320 vs $63.7; both mid-range class). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GPT-5.6 Luna (Max) when you need intelligence above 8.9, and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… when 8.9 is enough.

Metric	GPT-5.6 Luna (Max)	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	37.3	8.9	−76.1% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 76.1% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$319.93	$63.74	−80.1% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 80.1% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	135.46s	10.10s	−92.5% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 92.5% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.20 / $1.20	$0.05 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs GPT-5.6 Luna (Max): 76.1% less intelligence, 80.1% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 92.5% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GPT-5.6 Luna (Max): what beats it NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GPT-5.6 Luna (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 34.50 for $56.4.

GPT-5.6 Luna (Max)NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (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/gpt-5-6-luna/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/gpt-5-6-luna/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill