OpenAI's Images 2.5 ties Nano Banana 2 at three categories each in Decrypt's rerun

In May the same evaluator ran eight categories, and GPT Image 2 took more of them than Nano Banana 2 did ^[9]. No ties were reported, so "more of eight" means five at minimum, or 62.5%; three of six is 50% ^[16]. OpenAI's share of scored categories went down, in other words, in the release whose pitch is precision. The rounds are not strictly comparable, since the six categories were carried over or adapted from the earlier ones and fed as identical prompts to both models ^[10].

The 50% is OpenAI's own figure, and it compares Images 2.5 with Images 2.0 ^[2]. What Decrypt scored is image content, prompt by prompt ^[17]. The review does not include prices for Flare, Sunburst, or the new high and max quality tiers that now sit above where Images 2.0 topped out ^[15][14]. Until those land, a three-three split cannot be converted into a cost per acceptable image, and a cost per acceptable image is what an operator running thousands of poster variants actually needs.

Split by workload, the two models fail differently. For output a customer reads, what breaks is legibility, and Decrypt's text-heavy street scene put two slips on Images 2.5 against a single garbled payphone sticker on Google's side ^[6][5]. For output where atmosphere carries the job, Images 2.5 took the steampunk aerial by a clear margin ^[13].

OpenAI's image releases have run one signature defect per generation. GPT Image 1 carried a warm yellow cast the company never fully explained and never fully fixed ^[11]. GPT Image 2 traded it for oversharpening whenever a prompt stacked too many constraints ^[9]. This round, color balance and detail held at full complexity, and Decrypt reports neither defect ^[12].

Two legibility slips in one image is thin evidence for a third defect in that sequence, and the way to settle it is volume: if misspelled signage recurs across a few hundred prompts, the fix was a swap. I'd expect Google to hold the edge on anything with words in it, and the case against me is in Decrypt's own summary, which puts the swing between the two down to a few checkable mistakes instead of very noticeable issues ^[8].