Sonar Max on IFEval: score, rank and what it means
Sonar Max scores 85.2 on IFEval, placing it #188 of 600 models in the index. The benchmark average is 78.6 and the leader is Claude Opus 4.5 Pro at 96.1.
Score distribution
The chart shows the top 10 models on IFEval, with Sonar Max highlighted. Longer bars mean higher scores.
Top 10 leaderboard
| # | Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Opus 4.5 Pro | Anthropic | 200000 | $20.98 | 89.1 |
| 2 | Claude Opus 4.5 Reasoning | Anthropic | 2000000 | $20.91 | 88.2 |
| 3 | GPT-5.2 Pro | OpenAI | 2000000 | $21.32 | 89.6 |
| 4 | GPT-5.2 Max | OpenAI | 1000000 | $21.39 | 89.2 |
| 5 | GPT-5.2 Reasoning | OpenAI | 1000000 | $20.98 | 87.5 |
| 6 | GPT-5.1 Pro | OpenAI | 200000 | $19.77 | 87.8 |
| 7 | Gemini 3 Pro Max | Google DeepMind | 2000000 | $20.57 | 87.9 |
| 8 | GPT-5.1 Reasoning | OpenAI | 400000 | $20.27 | 88.3 |
| 9 | Claude Opus 4.5 Max | Anthropic | 1000000 | $20.90 | 87.8 |
| 10 | o4 Reasoning | OpenAI | 1000000 | $19.69 | 87.5 |
What this score means
On IFEval, Sonar Max sits at #188 of 600. The leader, Claude Opus 4.5 Pro, scores 96.1, so the gap to the top is 10.9 points. The median model in this index scores 81.2, which puts Sonar Max above the midpoint.
Perplexity models average 82.6 on this benchmark. Sonar Max is 2.6 points above that provider line, so it is a stronger result than the average Perplexity model.
Among multimodal models, the average is 85.2. Sonar Max is 0.0 points above that group. This is the more useful comparison if you are shortlisting within the same tier rather than across the whole index.
Read a 85.2 as a relative signal, not an absolute guarantee. Benchmark scores depend on prompt format, evaluation harness and contamination controls. Use this page to narrow the shortlist, then test the model on your own data.
Price context
At $11.60 per million input tokens, Sonar Max is above the median input price of $4.00 across the 600 models scored on IFEval. The models immediately around it in the ranking are shown below so you can compare score and price together.
| Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hunyuan-Turbo Turbo | Tencent | 65536 | $11.60 | 77.4 |
| Llama 4 Scout Instruct | Meta AI | 32768 | $4.59 | 79.1 |
| QwQ Chat | Alibaba Cloud | 65536 | $4.28 | 78.2 |
| Reka Flash Reasoning | Reka AI | 32768 | $10.70 | 75.6 |
| Sonar Max | Perplexity | 32768 | $11.60 | 77.8 |
| Sonar Reasoning | Perplexity | 200000 | $11.48 | 76.2 |
| Command R+ | Cohere | 32768 | $3.96 | 76.3 |
Other benchmarks for Sonar Max
| Benchmark | Score | Rank | Percentile | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 81.3 | 141 | 77th | |
| GPQA Diamond | 73.7 | 180 | 70th | |
| SWE-bench Verified | 63.0 | 253 | 58th | |
| HumanEval | 82.1 | 186 | 69th | |
| MATH-500 | 83.3 | 143 | 76th | |
| AIME 2025 | 74.9 | 156 | 74th | |
| LiveCodeBench | 72.8 | 133 | 78th | |
| TruthfulQA | 78.9 | 224 | 63th | |
| HellaSwag | 85.3 | 232 | 61th | |
| MMMU | 75.4 | 156 | 74th | |
| Arena Elo | 1395.2 | 227 | 62th |
FAQ
What score does Sonar Max get on IFEval?
Sonar Max scores 85.2 on IFEval in this index. The benchmark average is 78.6 and the top score is 96.1.
How does Sonar Max rank on IFEval?
It ranks #188 of 600 models, in the 69th percentile. The leader is Claude Opus 4.5 Pro at 96.1.
Is Sonar Max good at IFEval?
Yes, relative to the index: it is above the median and inside the top half of scores. The result should be read alongside its price and context window.
How is the IFEval score calculated?
IFEval is a instruction following benchmark. Scores in this index are modelled estimates on a 0–100 scale (or Elo for Arena), derived from capability tier and benchmark difficulty. They are not official leaderboard results.
What does Sonar Max cost?
Sonar Max costs $11.60 per million input tokens and $42.81 per million output tokens.