Coding
GBA Eval Leaderboard
GBA Eval, from Mechanize, gives a coding agent a long task: build a Game Boy Advance emulator from scratch in Rust and WebAssembly. The emulator is graded against a reference emulator on replayed gameplay, hardware test ROMs and audio; the 0–1 overall score is shown as redistributed by Epoch AI.
Source: epoch7 open models ranked+16 proprietaryData through Jul 2026
Open models ranked on GBA Eval
# shows rank among open models / rank overall (including proprietary).
| # | Model | Score | VRAM @ Q4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 / 9 | Kimi K3 · 2779.9B | 48.4% | ~1674 GB |
| 2 / 16 | MiniMax M3 · 427.0B | 0.9% | ~257 GB |
| 3 / 17 | Kimi K2.6 · 1026.9B | 0.9% | ~620 GB |
| 4 / 19 | Kimi K2.7 Code · 1026.9B | 0.9% | ~620 GB |
| 5 / 21 | GLM 5.2 · 753.3B | 0.0% | ~456 GB |
| 6 / 22 | GLM 5.1 · 753.9B | 0.0% | ~457 GB |
| 7 / 23 | MiniMax M2.7 · 228.7B | 0.0% | ~138 GB |
Score vs model size
Which models give the most quality for their size — the ones worth running locally.
- MiniMax M2.7, 229B, score 0.0% — on the efficiency frontier (best score at its size or smaller).
- MiniMax M3, 427B, score 0.9% — on the efficiency frontier (best score at its size or smaller).
- Kimi K3, 2.8T, score 48.4% — on the efficiency frontier (best score at its size or smaller).
GBA Eval: frequently asked questions
- What is the best open LLM on GBA Eval?
- Kimi K3 is the top open model on GBA Eval, scoring 48.4%. Among all models tested — including proprietary ones — it ranks #9. The top model overall is Claude Opus 5 (unspecified) (Anthropic) at 79.6%.
- Can open models match proprietary models on GBA Eval?
- Not quite on GBA Eval: the strongest proprietary model (Claude Opus 5 (unspecified)) scores 79.6%, ahead of the best open model (Kimi K3) at 48.4% — but you can run the open one yourself.
Scores aggregated from epoch. llmrun does not run this benchmark — see the source for methodology, or the about benchmarks for what it measures.