// head_to_head
Muse Spark 1.3 vs Nemotron 3 Ultra
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Muse Spark 1.3 scores higher, Nemotron 3 Ultra costs less — it depends on your workload.
Muse Spark 1.3 is ahead by 14.2 points overall, and Nemotron 3 Ultra lists 1.9× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 14.2 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. The two cost measures disagree here, which is worth knowing: Nemotron 3 Ultra has the lower sticker price, but Muse Spark 1.3 earns each point of capability for less — $0.1210 against $0.2118 — because per-token rates do not predict how many tokens a model actually spends on a task.
meta
Muse Spark 1.3
- Blended / 1M
- $2.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Sep 2, 2026
- Overall score
- 81.6
nvidia
Nemotron 3 Ultra
- Blended / 1M
- $1.05
- Context
- 262K
- Released
- Jun 4, 2026
- Overall score
- 67.4
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Muse Spark 1.3 | Nemotron 3 Ultra |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 81.6win | 67.4 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.1210win | $0.2118 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $2.00 | $1.05win |
| Input price / 1M | $1.25 | $0.600win |
| Output price / 1M | $4.25 | $2.40win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.150 | $0.120win |
| Context window | 1.0Mwin | 262K |
| Max output tokens | 944Kwin | 183K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Muse Spark 1.3 on top, Nemotron 3 Ultra below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Muse Spark 1.3 | Nemotron 3 Ultra |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $560.80/mo | $301.44/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $815.00/mo | $432.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $724.00/mo | $403.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $1,514/mo | $756.00/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $3,000/mo | $1,500/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Muse Spark 1.3
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.1210 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Muse Spark 1.3
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 81.6.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Muse Spark 1.3
Leads on agentic coding — 64.1 against 38.7.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Muse Spark 1.3
Wider context window — 1.0M against 262K.
You are cost-constrained
Nemotron 3 Ultra
Cheaper on blended list price at $1.05 per million tokens.
Muse Spark 1.3 vs Nemotron 3 Ultra FAQ
Which is better, Muse Spark 1.3 or Nemotron 3 Ultra?
Muse Spark 1.3 scores higher, Nemotron 3 Ultra costs less — it depends on your workload. Muse Spark 1.3 is ahead by 14.2 points overall, and Nemotron 3 Ultra lists 1.9× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 14.2 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. The two cost measures disagree here, which is worth knowing: Nemotron 3 Ultra has the lower sticker price, but Muse Spark 1.3 earns each point of capability for less — $0.1210 against $0.2118 — because per-token rates do not predict how many tokens a model actually spends on a task.
Is Muse Spark 1.3 cheaper than Nemotron 3 Ultra?
Nemotron 3 Ultra is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Muse Spark 1.3 lists at $2.00 per million tokens and Nemotron 3 Ultra at $1.05 — Nemotron 3 Ultra is 1.9× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Muse Spark 1.3 charges $1.25 in and $4.25 out, Nemotron 3 Ultra charges $0.600 and $2.40 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Muse Spark 1.3 vs Nemotron 3 Ultra: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Muse Spark 1.3 scores 81.6 and Nemotron 3 Ultra scores 67.4 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 14.2-point lead for Muse Spark 1.3. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Muse Spark 1.3 or Nemotron 3 Ultra?
Muse Spark 1.3. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Muse Spark 1.3 works out at $0.1210 per point and Nemotron 3 Ultra at $0.2118.
Does Muse Spark 1.3 or Nemotron 3 Ultra have a bigger context window?
Muse Spark 1.3 has the larger context window: 1.0M for Muse Spark 1.3 against 262K for Nemotron 3 Ultra. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Muse Spark 1.3 and Nemotron 3 Ultra support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.150 per million for Muse Spark 1.3 and $0.120 for Nemotron 3 Ultra, against full input rates of $1.25 and $0.600. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.