Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B vs Ministral 3 3B

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 64 to 27. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 77.2 against 30.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HumanEval, 66 to 15.

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Ministral 3 3B 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. Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B gives you the larger context window at 10M, compared with 128K for Ministral 3 3B.

Quick Verdict

Pick Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 3B only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Agentic

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

62.8

Ministral 3 3B

22.9

63
Terminal-Bench 2.0
19
69
BrowseComp
33
58
OSWorld-Verified
20

Coding

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

43.8

Ministral 3 3B

6.2

66
HumanEval
15
42
SWE-bench Verified
8
41
LiveCodeBench
7
47
SWE-bench Pro
5

Multimodal & Grounded

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

66.9

Ministral 3 3B

30.4

61
MMMU-Pro
25
74
OfficeQA Pro
37

Reasoning

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

77.2

Ministral 3 3B

30.1

71
SimpleQA
22
69
MuSR
20
85
BBH
57
81
LongBench v2
32
85
MRCRv2
35

Knowledge

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

57

Ministral 3 3B

24.5

74
MMLU
24
73
GPQA
23
71
SuperGPQA
21
69
OpenBookQA
19
73
MMLU-Pro
48
15
HLE
1
67
FrontierScience
28

Instruction Following

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

84

Ministral 3 3B

67

84
IFEval
67

Multilingual

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

79.7

Ministral 3 3B

59.7

81
MGSM
61
79
MMLU-ProX
59

Mathematics

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B

78

Ministral 3 3B

36

74
AIME 2023
23
76
AIME 2024
25
75
AIME 2025
24
70
HMMT Feb 2023
19
72
HMMT Feb 2024
21
71
HMMT Feb 2025
20
73
BRUMO 2025
22
84
MATH-500
53

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B is ahead overall, 64 to 27. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HumanEval, where the scores are 66 and 15.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57 versus 24.5. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 43.8 versus 6.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 78 versus 36. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 77.2 versus 30.1. Inside this category, MRCRv2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62.8 versus 22.9. 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, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 66.9 versus 30.4. Inside this category, OfficeQA Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 84 versus 67. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B or Ministral 3 3B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 59.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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