Mercury 2 vs Nemotron Ultra 253B

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

Mercury 2 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 48. 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 53.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MuSR, 82 to 45.

Mercury 2 gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for Nemotron Ultra 253B.

Quick Verdict

Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Nemotron Ultra 253B only becomes the better choice if its workflow or ecosystem matters more than the raw scoreboard.

Agentic

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

63.7

Nemotron Ultra 253B

46.7

63
Terminal-Bench 2.0
46
67
BrowseComp
50
62
OSWorld-Verified
45

Coding

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

41.1

Nemotron Ultra 253B

33.7

75
HumanEval
41
46
SWE-bench Verified
31
38
LiveCodeBench
30
43
SWE-bench Pro
38

Multimodal & Grounded

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

68.3

Nemotron Ultra 253B

44.7

66
MMMU-Pro
37
71
OfficeQA Pro
54

Reasoning

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

80.1

Nemotron Ultra 253B

53.3

82
SimpleQA
47
82
MuSR
45
87
BBH
77
77
LongBench v2
55
76
MRCRv2
56

Knowledge

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

57.2

Nemotron Ultra 253B

42.4

78
MMLU
49
78
GPQA
48
76
SuperGPQA
46
74
OpenBookQA
44
72
MMLU-Pro
63
9
HLE
11
69
FrontierScience
49

Instruction Following

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

84

Nemotron Ultra 253B

78

84
IFEval
78

Multilingual

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

79.7

Nemotron Ultra 253B

70.1

81
MGSM
74
79
MMLU-ProX
68

Mathematics

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

80.9

Nemotron Ultra 253B

59.7

81
AIME 2023
49
83
AIME 2024
51
82
AIME 2025
50
77
HMMT Feb 2023
45
79
HMMT Feb 2024
47
78
HMMT Feb 2025
46
80
BRUMO 2025
48
82
MATH-500
74

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Mercury 2 or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 48. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MuSR, where the scores are 82 and 45.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Mercury 2 or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57.2 versus 42.4. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Mercury 2 or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.1 versus 33.7. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Mercury 2 or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 59.7. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Mercury 2 or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 53.3. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Mercury 2 or Nemotron Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 63.7 versus 46.7. 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 Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 68.3 versus 44.7. 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 Ultra 253B?

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 Ultra 253B?

Mercury 2 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 70.1. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

Weekly LLM Benchmark Digest

Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.

Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.