Mercury 2 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

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

Mercury 2 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 45. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Mercury 2's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 80.1 against 54. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MuSR, 82 to 52.

Mercury 2 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Nemotron 3 Nano 30B 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. Mercury 2 gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for Nemotron 3 Nano 30B.

Quick Verdict

Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Nemotron 3 Nano 30B only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Agentic

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

63.7

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

39.6

63
Terminal-Bench 2.0
38
67
BrowseComp
43
62
OSWorld-Verified
39

Coding

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

41.1

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

22

75
HumanEval
49
46
SWE-bench Verified
26
38
LiveCodeBench
16
43
SWE-bench Pro
27

Multimodal & Grounded

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

68.3

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

45.2

66
MMMU-Pro
38
71
OfficeQA Pro
54

Reasoning

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

80.1

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

54

82
SimpleQA
54
82
MuSR
52
87
BBH
72
77
LongBench v2
51
76
MRCRv2
51

Knowledge

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

57.2

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

43.8

78
MMLU
57
78
GPQA
56
76
SuperGPQA
54
74
OpenBookQA
52
72
MMLU-Pro
65
9
HLE
1
69
FrontierScience
54

Instruction Following

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

84

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

78

84
IFEval
78

Multilingual

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

79.7

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

71.8

81
MGSM
75
79
MMLU-ProX
70

Mathematics

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

80.9

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B

63.7

81
AIME 2023
57
83
AIME 2024
59
82
AIME 2025
58
77
HMMT Feb 2023
53
79
HMMT Feb 2024
55
78
HMMT Feb 2025
54
80
BRUMO 2025
56
82
MATH-500
73

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 45. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MuSR, where the scores are 82 and 52.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57.2 versus 43.8. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.1 versus 22. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 63.7. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 54. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 63.7 versus 39.6. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 68.3 versus 45.2. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 84 versus 78. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Mercury 2 or Nemotron 3 Nano 30B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 71.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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