Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Gemini 4 Argon is more accurate: 84.8% against 15.0% on the same 79 questions, a 69.8-point gap that is statistically significant.
- Gemma 4 26B A4B is 5.8× cheaper per question as billed ($0.0011 vs $0.0063), reasoning tokens included.
- Gemma 4 26B A4B generates text 2.5× faster: 172 tokens per second against 69.
- Gemma 4 26B A4B starts answering sooner: 0.7 s to the first token, against 3.3 s for Gemini 4 Argon.
- Gemini 4 Argon accepts more context: 1M tokens against 262k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemini 4 Argon for the most accurate answers of the two, shorter outputs (about 558 tokens per question against 3,722) and a 1M-token context window. Choose Gemma 4 26B A4B for faster streaming, a quicker first token, open weights you can run yourself and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (15 against 2). The widest subject gap is in engineering: Gemini 4 Argon answered 13 of 14 correctly, Gemma 4 26B A4B 0 of 15. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap +69.8 points (z = 8.80). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.