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Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Gemini 4 Carbon

Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 3.8 Flash score 89.4% vs 79.8% averaged across five Vision Evals tasks (#1 and #10 of 68 models), so Gemini 4 Carbon leads overall.

  • Gemini 4 Carbon wins 4 of the 5 tasks, with its widest lead on object detection (84.5% vs 68.1%).
  • Gemini 3.8 Flash is cheaper: $0.0045 vs $0.0061 overall average cost per sample.
  • Gemini 4 Carbon is faster: 8.7s vs 12.8s per sample.

Compare Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Gemini 4 Carbon live

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GoogleGemini 3.8 Flash
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GoogleGemini 4 Carbon
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Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Gemini 4 Carbon on Vision Evals

Score by taskGemini 3.8 FlashGemini 4 Carbon
Object Detection
68.1
84.5
OCR
72.8
87.2
Counting
78.8
90.1
Reasoning
81.2
91.4
Identification
97.9
93.8

Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.

Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Gemini 4 Carbon Comparison Table

Evals updated November 10, 2026Pricing updated November 11, 2026

PropertyGemini 3.8 FlashGemini 4 Carbon
OrganizationGoogleGoogle
Categoryclosedclosed
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateSep 2026Nov 2026
Context Window1.0M1.0M
ParametersUnknownUnknown
LicenseProprietaryProprietary
Commercial usecommercial use per vendor termscommercial use per vendor terms
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.825No published price
Output $/1M$4.13No published price
Vision Tasks
Promptable Concept SegmentationNot listedDemo
Both support 10 more tasks
Model Features
Both support 3 more features
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort
Overall
79.8%
89.4%
Avg cost / sample$0.0045$0.0061
Avg speed / sample12.76s8.71s
By task
Object Detection (low)
68.1%
±0.8, Mean of 3 runs, range 67.3 to 69.0
$0.0045
84.5%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.2 to 84.8
$0.011
Object Detection (high)
74.8%
±1.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 73.4 to 75.6
$0.023
85.9%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 85.6 to 86.2
$0.102
Counting (low)
78.8%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 75.7 to 81.1
$0.0040
90.1%
±1.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 89.2 to 91.9
$0.0024
Counting (high)
79.3%
±1.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 81.1
$0.027
86.9%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 83.8 to 89.2
$0.075
Identification (low)
97.9%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 100.0
$0.0016
93.8%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 93.8 to 93.8
$0.0024
Identification (high)
96.9%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9
$0.0037
96.9%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9
$0.019
OCR (low)
72.8%
$0.0049
87.2%
$0.0053
by category
Single value
73.5%
Transcription
91.3%
Structured JSON
86.1%
Text localization
26.4%
Single value
80.4%
Transcription
96.6%
Structured JSON
93.0%
Text localization
84.2%
OCR (high)
78.7%
$0.039
89.7%
$0.102
by category
Single value
70.9%
Transcription
94.1%
Structured JSON
90.9%
Text localization
58.6%
Single value
85.2%
Transcription
99.1%
Structured JSON
93.9%
Text localization
85.2%
Reasoning (low)
81.2%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 80.8 to 81.5
$0.0038
91.4%
±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 90.1 to 93.4
$0.0025
Reasoning (high)
84.5%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 83.4 to 85.4
$0.023
92.3%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 92.0 to 92.7
$0.057

Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Gemini 4 Carbon: Overview

Gemini 3.8 Flash

Gemini 3.8 Flash is a natively multimodal reasoning model in Google's Gemini 3 series, positioned as the speed and cost oriented Flash tier while targeting long-horizon software engineering, autonomous agents, and enterprise workflows. It accepts text, images, video, audio, and PDF documents in a single request and returns text, with an input limit of 1,048,576 tokens and an output limit of 65,536 tokens. Thinking is configurable at low, medium, and high levels, and the model supports function calling, code execution, structured outputs, context caching, search and Maps grounding, file search, and computer use in preview. Image generation, audio generation, and the Live API are not supported.

Following Gemini API conventions, it can localize objects by emitting bounding boxes as [ymin, xmin, ymax, xmax] integers normalized to a 0 to 1000 range, which supports prompt driven detection and grounding in addition to captioning, document parsing, and visual question answering. The knowledge cutoff is March 2026, though coverage in some domains reflects the January 2025 cutoff shared across the Gemini 3 family.

Gemini 4 Carbon

Gemini 4 Carbon is a multimodal model from Google. It builds on Gemini 4 Argon and supports reasoning over text and images. Google describes improvements in coding and long-running tasks. Model weights are not publicly released.

Frequently Asked Questions

On Roboflow's Vision Evals, Gemini 4 Carbon performed better. It scores higher on 4 of the five vision tasks and averages 89.4% (#1 of 68) against 79.8% (#10 of 68) for Gemini 3.8 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 Carbon leads with 84.5% against 68.1%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0045 per sample against $0.0061. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.

Gemini 4 Carbon is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 8.7s per inference against 12.8s. 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 object detection and image captioning in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.