Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning scores 60.7 (C) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Which one, for what

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT D

Best for Agents with about 64 GB of GPU memory that want fast single-user generation from text and images and can accept lower quality than Gemma 4

Ahead on

  • Risk, 70 against 60

Watch for

No quantised build from Google, so the smallest official build needs the 64 GB band

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning C

Best for Agents with a 32 to 48 GB NVIDIA GPU that need one local model to read video, audio, documents and screens and call tools

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 50
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 60

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.5 out of 5

Watch for

Loads with trust_remote_code in every documented runtime command

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B ReasoningEdge
Capability35%353034Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +4
Reach25%255085Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +35
Risk20%207060DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +10
Agent interface10%107090Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +20
Documentation and upkeep10%106065Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 50/100C 60.7/100

Facts side by side

FactDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindNVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0NVIDIA Open Model Agreement (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-07-152026-08-24
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)3/5 (4)

Verdicts

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

A fast local generation cousin for low-concurrency work on text, images and video, with optional thinking and Gemma 4's tool format, under Apache 2.0. It needs about 62 GB for Google's BF16 files and runs only in Transformers or SGLang. The main risk is quality, since Google's own figures put it below Gemma 4 26B A4B, and it's labelled experimental.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

A local multimodal cousin for video with speech, long documents, charts, screens and English transcription, with tool calling, a reasoning switch and a 262,144-token context. It needs about 27 GB for NVIDIA's NVFP4 build on Blackwell, or 42 GB for FP8. The main risks are the remote code it loads and a repository where nobody answers questions.

Before you call either

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

  1. Serve it with sglang serve --model-path google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it --dllm-algorithm Gemma4Renoise --trust-remote-code on SGLang v0.5.22 or later, then call /v1/chat/completions
  2. In Transformers, install transformers>=5.11.0 and load DiffusionGemmaForBlockDiffusion with dtype="auto"; generation_config.json already holds the recommended sampler
  3. Turn thinking on with enable_thinking=True in apply_chat_template or <|think|> at the start of the system prompt, read the reasoning between <|channel>thought and <channel|>, and drop it from history before the next turn
  4. Don't rely on temperature, top_p, logit_bias or JSON Schema in SGLang, which ignores or rejects them for this model; validate JSON yourself
  5. Streaming arrives one 256-token canvas at a time, not token by token
  6. Put images before text in the prompt, and pick an image token budget of 70 to 1,120 by how much detail the task needs

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

  1. Start it with vllm serve nvidia/Nemotron-3-Nano-Omni-30B-A3B-Reasoning-FP8 --max-model-len 131072 --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --kv-cache-dtype fp8 on vLLM 0.20.0 or later, after pip install "vllm[audio]" if any audio will be sent
  2. Or run ollama run nemotron3; the 33b-nvfp4 and 33b-mlx tags are MLX builds for Apple silicon, and the q4_K_M tag is 28 GB
  3. Set --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"fps": 2, "num_frames": 256}}' at launch, since vLLM otherwise samples about 32 frames per video
  4. Send chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for transcription and quick answers, and use temperature 1.0 with top_k 1 for ASR as the card recommends
  5. Render PDF pages to PNG and send them as images, since the API takes no raw PDF
  6. Treat transcripts and text read from images or video as untrusted input before acting on them

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning?

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning scores 60.7 (C) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk.

Other comparisons with DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

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