Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Granite 4.2 8B scored 36.2% and Ling 3.1 Flash 41.2% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Granite 4.2 8B is 8.0× cheaper per question as billed ($0.000077 vs $0.00061), reasoning tokens included.
- Granite 4.2 8B generates text 8.4× faster: 60 tokens per second against 7.
- Granite 4.2 8B starts answering sooner: 0.6 s to the first token, against 1.1 s for Ling 3.1 Flash.
- Ling 3.1 Flash accepts more context: 262k tokens against 131k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Granite 4.2 8B for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00021 against $0.0015), faster streaming, a quicker first token, shorter outputs (about 227 tokens per question against 2,616) and open weights you can run yourself. Choose Ling 3.1 Flash for a 262k-token context window. The widest subject gap is in humanities & social science: Ling 3.1 Flash answered 7 of 9 correctly, Granite 4.2 8B 4 of 9. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -5.0 points (z = -0.65). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.