Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

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.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

A mid-sized vision-language cousin for screenshots, documents, charts and video that runs fast for its size, with about 3B active parameters. It needs about 23 GB for Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file, loads in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0, and three providers host it. With no published safety work, add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

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

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:30b-a3b-instruct
2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:30b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 30b-a3b-instruct
3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
5. Use the shipped sampling, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and top_k 20, from generation_config.json
6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later, Transformers 4.57.0 or later and llama.cpp b6907 or later