Gemma 3 12B Instruct
Multimodal and long-context in a 12B footprint. Interleaved local/global attention keeps the KV cache affordable.
Tight fit
- Weights
- 6.9 GB
- KV cache
- 2.8 GB
- Overhead
- 670 MB
- 10 GB of 11 GB usable VRAM.
- Little headroom left — a longer context or a second app may push it over.
- Chosen as the best quality that still fits a 8,192-token context (10 GB at that length).
- Reads images as well as text
- 128k context
- Very broad language coverage
- Vision path needs runtime support
- Behind Qwen3 on pure reasoning
gemma3:12bRunning Gemma 3 12B Instruct on GeForce RTX 4070
| Quantization | Quality | Weights | KV cache | Total | ~tok/s | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F16 | lossless | 23 GB | 2.8 GB | 26 GB | 16 | Runs with CPU offload |
| Q8_0 | near-lossless | 12 GB | 2.8 GB | 16 GB | 30 | Runs with CPU offload |
| Q6_K | near-lossless | 9.3 GB | 2.8 GB | 13 GB | 39 | Runs with CPU offload |
| Q5_K_M | high | 8.1 GB | 2.8 GB | 12 GB | 45 | Runs with CPU offload |
| Q4_K_MPick | balanced | 6.9 GB | 2.8 GB | 10 GB | 53 | Tight fit |
| Q3_K_M | degraded | 5.5 GB | 2.8 GB | 9.0 GB | 65 | Tight fit |
KV cache is sized at 8,192 tokens. Longer contexts cost proportionally more — the recommendation above reserves room for a working context.
You can fine-tune this here
- Base weights
- 6.4 GB
- Optimizer
- 967 MB
- Activations
- 1.1 GB
- Peak
- 10 GB
- Fits, but an OOM is likely if the sequence length or batch size rises.
- Base weights
- 23 GB
- Optimizer
- 967 MB
- Activations
- 1.1 GB
- Peak
- 27 GB
- Needs 27 GB — switch to QLoRA to cut the weight footprint.
Where this model runs
VRAM 32 GB · Q8_0 · 16 GB
VRAM 24 GB · Q8_0 · 16 GB
VRAM 16 GB · Q5_K_M · 12 GB
VRAM 16 GB · Q5_K_M · 12 GB
VRAM 24 GB · Q8_0 · 16 GB
VRAM 12 GB · Q4_K_M · 10 GB
VRAM 12 GB · Q4_K_M · 10 GB
VRAM 16 GB · Q5_K_M · 12 GB
VRAM 48 GB · F16 · 26 GB
VRAM 80 GB · F16 · 26 GB
Unified 128 GB · F16 · 26 GB
Unified 48 GB · Q8_0 · 16 GB
Unified 24 GB · Q5_K_M · 12 GB
Unified 192 GB · F16 · 26 GB
Unified 16 GB · Q4_K_M · 10 GB
VRAM 24 GB · Q8_0 · 16 GB
VRAM 16 GB · Q5_K_M · 12 GB
VRAM 0 MB
VRAM 0 MB
Qwen2.5 7B Instruct
7.6B · Apache 2.0
The default starting point for local work on 8–12 GB cards. Strong instruction following and reliable tool-call formatting for its size.
Qwen2.5 14B Instruct
14.8B · Apache 2.0
The sweet spot for 24 GB cards. Meaningfully stronger reasoning than 7B while still fine-tunable locally with QLoRA.
Qwen2.5 Coder 7B Instruct
7.6B · Apache 2.0
The practical local copilot. Supports fill-in-the-middle, so it works as an inline completion model rather than only a chat assistant.
Qwen3 8B
8.2B · Apache 2.0
Switchable thinking mode: the same weights answer directly or reason step by step depending on the prompt. Long context for its size.
Catalogue figures come from each model’s published card. ModelLM has not independently measured them.