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

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Which one, for what

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Capability, 54 against 24
  • Reach, 75 against 55
  • Risk, 65 against 55
  • Agent interface, 90 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 26

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct E

Best for Agents on a machine with about 96 GB to spare that need one local model to hear, see and answer by voice

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

Only a 70.5 GB BF16 build, about 85 GB to run, with no quantised build from Alibaba

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%355424Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +30
Reach25%257555Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +20
Risk20%206555Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +10
Agent interface10%109060Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +30
Documentation and upkeep10%106526Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +39
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 66.2/100E 41.8/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceNVIDIA Nemotron Open Model LicenseApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-03-112025-09-22
Terms last updatedno document linkedno 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 reviews2.8/5 (4)2/5 (4)

Verdicts

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

An omni-modal cousin that listens, watches and reads, then answers in text or one of three voices, with tool calls from spoken requests, under plain Apache 2.0. Its only build, BF16, needs about 85 GB, and speech out needs Transformers or vLLM-Omni. The main risk is no answers from Qwen and no safety work for speech-driven actions.

Before you call either

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. For text answers, mkdir -p media && vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 32768 --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media" with vLLM 0.11.1 or later serves the Thinker on an OpenAI-compatible API
  2. The card's command passes --allowed-local-media-path /, which lets anyone who can reach the server have it read any file on the machine through a file:// URL. Point it at a dedicated folder that holds only the media you mean to send, as above, and give vLLM an absolute path
  3. Send audio as audio_url and images as image_url content parts; vLLM serve doesn't take use_audio_in_video, so pass a video's audio separately
  4. For speech out, load Qwen3OmniMoeForConditionalGeneration in Transformers 4.57.0 or later with qwen-omni-utils, pick speaker Ethan, Chelsie or Aiden, and write the returned waveform at 24 kHz
  5. Call model.disable_talker() or pass return_audio=False when you only need text, which saves about 10 GB and time
  6. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags yourself, since no parser is named, and confirm actions triggered by speech before running them
  7. Keep use_audio_in_video the same across every step of a conversation, the card warns results go wrong otherwise
  8. Budget memory for video, the card's table rises from 78.85 GB for 15 seconds to 144.81 GB for 120 seconds in BF16

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

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