Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scored 43.8% and Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 40.0% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 2.6× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00049 vs $0.0013), reasoning tokens included.
- Nemotron 3.5 Super VL generates text 6.1× faster: 715 tokens per second against 116.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning starts answering sooner: 0.5 s to the first token, against 0.6 s for Nemotron 3.5 Super VL.
- Nemotron 3.5 Super VL accepts more context: 1M tokens against 262k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0011 against $0.0032) and a quicker first token. Choose Nemotron 3.5 Super VL for faster streaming, a 1M-token context window and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (9 against 4). The widest subject gap is in medicine: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning answered 4 of 11 correctly, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 2 of 11. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap +3.7 points (z = 0.48). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.