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

Which is better for the money: GPT-5.6 Terra (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 Terra (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 42.10
Total cost: $2501

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 Terra (Max) scores 33.2 points higher (42.1 vs 8.9) but costs 39× as much to run the benchmark ($2501 vs $63.7; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GPT-5.6 Terra (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 Terra (Max)	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	42.1	8.9	−78.9% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 78.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,500.72	$63.74	−97.5% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 97.5% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	115.44s	10.10s	−91.3% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 91.3% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $12.0	$0.05 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs GPT-5.6 Terra (Max): 78.9% less intelligence, 97.5% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 91.3% faster end-to-end.

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

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.
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 Terra (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-terra/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/gpt-5-6-terra/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill