Robocurve — internal reference

Real-world image quality vs. serving speed — 12 models

DATA AS OF 2026-07-27

Vision Arena ELO (blind head-to-head votes on real user-uploaded photos) against each model's fastest benchmarked output speed. Up and to the right is better; the dashed staircase is the Pareto frontier — models below/left of it are beaten on both axes by something else.

Gemini (closed API) Gemma 4 (open weights) Other flagships Pareto frontier whiskers = ±95% ELO CI

Model	Vision Arena ELO	Max output speed	Speed source

Frontier: Claude Fable 5 (best image quality), Gemini 3.6 Flash (best quality-speed balance), Gemma 4 31B on Cerebras (fastest by ~8×). Everything else is dominated.

Excluded for missing data: Gemini 3 Pro (ELO 1289) and Meta's Muse Spark (ELO 1295) — Artificial Analysis reports no speed for either; Inkling by Thinking Machines (87.4 t/s) and Kimi K3 (33.3 t/s, 144 s time-to-first-token) — neither is on the Vision Arena leaderboard yet. Claude Opus 5 / Opus 4.6 / Sonnet variants and mid-board GPT variants are omitted for legibility; all sit at or below 1300 ELO (under Gemini 3.6 Flash's 1301) at sub-240 t/s speeds, so every one is dominated by Gemini 3.6 Flash and none can change the frontier.

Caveats: ELO intervals are 95% CIs — Gemini 3.6 Flash's ±38 is wide (new model, few votes). Speeds are Artificial Analysis medians at each model's benchmarked reasoning setting, taking the fastest tracked provider for open-weights models (Cerebras for Gemma 31B, Cloudflare for 26B A4B) and the first-party API for closed models. Arena setting and speed-benchmark setting may differ slightly (e.g. thinking budgets). Log-scale x-axis.