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Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemini 4 Hydrogen

Gemini 4 Hydrogen and Gemini 3.6 Flash score 87.3% vs 77.1% averaged across five Vision Evals tasks (#3 and #15 of 69 models), so Gemini 4 Hydrogen leads overall.

  • Gemini 4 Hydrogen wins 4 of the 5 tasks, with its widest lead on object detection (81.0% vs 57.1%).
  • Gemini 3.6 Flash is about a third of the cost: $0.0033 vs $0.0094 overall average cost per sample.
  • Gemini 3.6 Flash is faster: 10.4s vs 13.2s per sample.

Compare Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemini 4 Hydrogen live

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GoogleGemini 3.6 Flash
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GoogleGemini 4 Hydrogen
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Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemini 4 Hydrogen on Vision Evals

Score by taskGemini 3.6 FlashGemini 4 Hydrogen
Object Detection
57.1
81.0
OCR
71.8
86.7
Reasoning
77.7
88.1
Counting
80.2
83.8
Identification
99.0
96.9

Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.

Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemini 4 Hydrogen Comparison Table

Evals updated November 12, 2026Pricing updated November 13, 2026

PropertyGemini 3.6 FlashGemini 4 Hydrogen
OrganizationGoogleGoogle
Categoryclosedclosed
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateJul 2026Nov 2026
Context Window1.0M1.0M
ParametersUnknownUnknown
LicenseProprietaryProprietary
Commercial usecommercial use per vendor termscommercial use per vendor terms
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.750No published price
Output $/1M$3.75No published price
Vision Tasks
Chart Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
Document Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
Image TaggingSupportedNot listed
Multi-Label ClassificationSupportedNot listed
Promptable Concept SegmentationNot listedDemo
Video ClassificationSupportedNot listed
Both support 6 more tasks
Model Features
Both support 3 more features
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort
Overall
77.1%
87.3%
Avg cost / sample$0.0033$0.0094
Avg speed / sample10.43s13.23s
By task
Object Detection (low)
57.1%
±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 55.9 to 59.4
$0.0041
81.0%
±0.8, Mean of 3 runs, range 80.3 to 81.9
$0.016
Object Detection (high)
70.7%
±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 70.3 to 71.2
$0.0093
83.3%
±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.4 to 83.8
$0.022
Counting (low)
80.2%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4
$0.0034
83.8%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.4 to 86.5
$0.0041
Counting (high)
79.3%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 77.0 to 82.4
$0.0089
84.2%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.4 to 87.8
$0.012
Identification (low)
99.0%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 100.0
$0.0015
96.9%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9
$0.0030
Identification (high)
100.0%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 100.0 to 100.0
$0.0033
96.9%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9
$0.0039
OCR (low)
71.8%
$0.0030
86.7%
$0.0089
by category
Single value
68.3%
Transcription
89.4%
Structured JSON
82.9%
Text localization
42.5%
Single value
78.7%
Transcription
96.1%
Structured JSON
93.6%
Text localization
83.9%
OCR (high)
77.4%
$0.014
87.2%
$0.026
by category
Single value
68.7%
Transcription
90.3%
Structured JSON
89.3%
Text localization
62.1%
Single value
80.9%
Transcription
95.3%
Structured JSON
93.1%
Text localization
83.7%
Reasoning (low)
77.7%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.2 to 80.1
$0.0031
88.1%
±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 87.4 to 88.7
$0.0046
Reasoning (high)
81.0%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.5 to 83.4
$0.0091
91.8%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 91.4 to 92.0
$0.013

Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemini 4 Hydrogen: Overview

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Gemini 3.6 Flash is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, positioned as the workhorse tier in the Gemini 3.x family. It accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs with a 1 million token context window and produces up to 64,000 output tokens. The model builds directly on Gemini 3.5 Flash, incorporating developer and customer feedback to improve token efficiency, coding quality, and knowledge work performance. According to the Artificial Analysis Index, it consumes 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, and on some benchmarks such as DeepSWE, token reduction reaches up to 65%. It supports function calling, structured output, search as a tool, and code execution, and includes computer use as a built-in capability in the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise.

On coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE versus 37% for 3.5 Flash, and 63.9% on MLE Bench versus 49.7%. The model carries a knowledge cutoff of March 2026 and ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards covering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cyber offense domains, with training to minimize refusals for beneficial uses. It is a proprietary, closed-weights model available in preview through the Gemini API via Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini app.

Gemini 4 Hydrogen

Gemini 4 Hydrogen is a multimodal model from Google, positioned as a successor to Gemini 3.8 Flash with stronger agent and coding capabilities at Flash-class speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

On Roboflow's Vision Evals, Gemini 4 Hydrogen performed better. It scores higher on 4 of the five vision tasks and averages 87.3% (#3 of 69) against 77.1% (#15 of 69) for Gemini 3.6 Flash. These scores measure vision capabilities only; either model may perform differently on work outside this benchmark's tasks.

No. On the Vision Evals Object Detection benchmark at low effort, Gemini 4 Hydrogen leads with 81.0% against 57.1%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0033 per sample against $0.0094. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 10.4s per inference against 13.2s. Latency varies with image size, prompt length, and provider load, so treat these as relative rather than guaranteed figures.

Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for open prompts and image classification in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.