Granite-4.0-1B vs Nemotron Ultra 253B

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Granite-4.0-1B· Nemotron Ultra 253B

Quick Verdict

Pick Nemotron Ultra 253B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Granite-4.0-1B only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you need the larger 128K context window.

Nemotron Ultra 253B finishes one point ahead overall, 41 to 40. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.

Nemotron Ultra 253B's sharpest advantage is in multilingual, where it averages 70.1 against 27.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MGSM, 27.5% to 74%. Granite-4.0-1B does hit back in instruction following, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Nemotron Ultra 253B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Granite-4.0-1B is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Granite-4.0-1B gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for Nemotron Ultra 253B.

Operational tradeoffs

ProviderIBMNVIDIA
PriceFree*Free*
SpeedN/AN/A
TTFTN/AN/A
Context128K32K

Decision framing

BenchLM keeps the benchmark table and the operator tradeoffs on the same page so a better score does not hide a materially slower, pricier, or smaller-context model.

Runtime metrics show N/A when BenchLM does not have a sourced snapshot for that exact model. The scoring rules and freshness policy are documented on the methodology page.

BenchmarkGranite-4.0-1BNemotron Ultra 253B
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.046%
BrowseComp50%
OSWorld-Verified45%
Coding
HumanEval73%41%
SWE-bench Verified31%
LiveCodeBench30%
SWE-bench Pro38%
Multimodal & Grounded
MMMU-Pro37%
OfficeQA Pro54%
Reasoning
BBH59.7%77%
MuSR45%
LongBench v255%
MRCRv256%
KnowledgeNemotron Ultra 253B wins
MMLU59.7%49%
GPQA29.7%48%
MMLU-Pro32.9%63%
SuperGPQA46%
HLE11%
FrontierScience49%
SimpleQA47%
Instruction FollowingGranite-4.0-1B wins
IFEval78.5%78%
MultilingualNemotron Ultra 253B wins
MGSM27.5%74%
MMLU-ProX68%
Mathematics
AIME 202349%
AIME 202451%
AIME 202550%
HMMT Feb 202345%
HMMT Feb 202447%
HMMT Feb 202546%
BRUMO 202548%
MATH-50074%
Frequently Asked Questions (4)

Which is better, Granite-4.0-1B or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Nemotron Ultra 253B is ahead overall, 41 to 40. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MGSM, where the scores are 27.5% and 74%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Granite-4.0-1B or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Nemotron Ultra 253B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 42.6 versus 31.7. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Granite-4.0-1B or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Granite-4.0-1B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 78.5 versus 78. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Granite-4.0-1B or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Nemotron Ultra 253B has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.1 versus 27.5. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 31, 2026

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