Gemini 4 Argon beats Claude Opus 5.5 in a 3D animation test for less than a quarter of the cost

Google’s latest frontier model has arrived with a party trick. In a side-by-side comparison, Gemini 4 Argon produced a detailed 3D animation of a Tesla-style electric motor for less than a quarter of what Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 cost on the same task. The comparison was shared publicly by AI researcher Rubens Soto. It lands just weeks after Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5, which makes the timing about as subtle as a billboard across the street from a competitor’s store. What Argon actually built The test asked each model to generate an animation of a permanent-magnet AC electric motor styled after Tesla’s designs. Argon’s output ran 40 seconds and showed the motor’s assembly in detail, with no branding attached. The animation contained 1,200 frames rendered at full HD resolution, 1920×1080. That works out to 30 frames per second, which is roughly the cadence of standard video. The cost gap is where things get interesting. On list prices alone, Argon runs at half of Opus 5.5’s rate. Getting to less than a quarter of the cost means the remaining difference would have to come from how many tokens each model consumed on the job. Here are the numbers. Argon starts at $2 per million input...