Granite 4.2 3B vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)
Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 3B by IBM 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.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Granite 4.2 3B
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs Granite 4.2 3B: 2.2% less intelligence, 327.5% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 84.1% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Granite 4.2 3B | NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 9.1 | 8.9 | −2.2% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 2.2% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $14.91 | $63.74 | +327.5% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 4.3× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 63.71s | 10.12s | −84.1% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 84.1% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.03 / $0.12 | $0.05 / $0.20 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Granite 4.2 3B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
- 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.
Granite 4.2 3BNVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Agents:
Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill