Gemma on NVIDIA Ada

Can I run Gemma 3 4B on an RTX 4090?

Yes. Gemma 3 4B at Q4_K_M uses 3.6 GB of the 21.8 GB available on a RTX 4090, and runs at about 215 tokens per second. You can push the context to 128K.

Runs comfortably

3.6 GB of 21.8 GB · 16%
022 GB
Weights 2.5 GB
KV cache 0.3 GB
Runtime overhead 0.8 GB

Gemma 3 4B at Q4_K_M leaves 18.2 GB spare on a RTX 4090. There is room to raise the context length or move up a quantisation level.

Generation215tok/s
Prompt processing8058tok/s
Max context128Ktokens
KV per 1K tokens0GB

Every quantisation of Gemma 3 4B on a RTX 4090

Highlighted row is the highest quality that still fits at 8K context.

QuantisationbpwWeights TotalVerdictMax ctxtok/s
FP16 / BF16 16.00 8.0 GB 9.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 72.5
INT8 / W8A8 8.50 4.1 GB 5.2 GB Runs comfortably 128K 136
Q8_0 (GGUF) 8.50 4.1 GB 5.2 GB Runs comfortably 128K 136
FP8 (E4M3) 8.00 4.0 GB 5.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 140
Q6_K 6.56 3.3 GB 4.4 GB Runs comfortably 128K 167
AWQ 4-bit 4.25 3.0 GB 4.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 179
GPTQ 4-bit 4.25 3.0 GB 4.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 179
MXFP4 4.25 3.0 GB 4.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 179
Q5_K_M 5.67 2.8 GB 3.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 191
Q5_K_S 5.52 2.8 GB 3.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 196
Q4_K_M 4.85 2.5 GB 3.6 GB Runs comfortably 128K 215
Q4_K_S 4.58 2.4 GB 3.5 GB Runs comfortably 128K 225
Q4_0 4.55 2.4 GB 3.4 GB Runs comfortably 128K 226
IQ4_XS 4.25 2.2 GB 3.3 GB Runs comfortably 128K 237
Q3_K_M 3.91 2.1 GB 3.2 GB Runs comfortably 128K 251
IQ3_M 3.70 2.0 GB 3.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 261
IQ3_XXS 3.06 1.7 GB 2.8 GB Runs comfortably 128K 295
Q2_K 2.63 1.5 GB 2.6 GB Runs comfortably 128K 324
IQ2_XXS 2.06 1.3 GB 2.4 GB Runs comfortably 128K 372
IQ1_M 1.75 1.2 GB 2.3 GB Runs comfortably 128K 404

Also worth checking

Gemma 3 4B on every GPU
Full hardware tableEverything that runs on a RTX 4090
Full model tableWhy the KV cache is the part that bites
Guide