Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Which is better for the money: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning by NVIDIA or Qwen3.8 Max (0902) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Trade-off
Verdict
Depends on your budget
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores 32.5 points higher (45.4 vs 12.9) but costs 53× as much to run the benchmark ($4935 vs $92.8; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need intelligence above 12.9, and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning when 12.9 is enough.
| Metric | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 12.9 | 45.4 | +251.9% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 3.5× more intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $92.76 | $4,934.79 | +5220.0% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 53× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 8.98s | 62.92s | +600.7% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 600.7% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.06 / $0.20 | $2.00 / $6.00 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text, Image |
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 251.9% more intelligence, 5220.0% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 600.7% slower end-to-end.
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Xhigh) scores 34.60 for $66.8.
- Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
Nemotron 3.5 LightningQwen3.8 Max (0902)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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