Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Step 3.5 Flash has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 66 versus 64. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Step 3.5 Flash's sharpest advantage is in mathematics, where it averages 84.5 against 78. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MuSR, 82 to 69. Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B does hit back in agentic, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Step 3.5 Flash 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 256K for Step 3.5 Flash.
Pick Step 3.5 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B only becomes the better choice if agentic is the priority or you need the larger 10M context window.
Step 3.5 Flash
60.2
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
62.8
Step 3.5 Flash
47.1
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
43.8
Step 3.5 Flash
66.7
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
66.9
Step 3.5 Flash
78.3
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
77.2
Step 3.5 Flash
60.8
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
57
Step 3.5 Flash
87
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
84
Step 3.5 Flash
82.8
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
79.7
Step 3.5 Flash
84.5
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B
78
Step 3.5 Flash is ahead overall, 66 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MuSR, where the scores are 82 and 69.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 60.8 versus 57. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 47.1 versus 43.8. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 84.5 versus 78. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 78.3 versus 77.2. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62.8 versus 60.2. Inside this category, OSWorld-Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nemotron 3 Ultra 500B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 66.9 versus 66.7. Inside this category, OfficeQA Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 87 versus 84. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 82.8 versus 79.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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