Mercury 2 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Which is better for the money: Mercury 2 by Inception or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Mercury 2: 19.4% more intelligence, 11.6% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 36.9% slower end-to-end.
| Metric | Mercury 2 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 10.8 | 12.9 | +19.4% Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 19.4% more intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $104.94 | $92.76 | −11.6% Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 11.6% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 6.56s | 8.98s | +36.9% Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 36.9% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.25 / $0.75 | $0.06 / $0.20 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Mercury 2 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) scores 37.80 for $94.1.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Xhigh) scores 34.60 for $66.8.
Mercury 2Nemotron 3.5 LightningToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2/nemotron-3-5-lightning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2/nemotron-3-5-lightning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill