NVIDIA · Ampere
What runs on a RTX 3080 12GB
12 GB at 912 GB/s. The largest model that fits at Q4_K_M is Mistral NeMo 12B, at roughly 73.4 tokens per second.
Runs comfortably
6.4 GB of 10.5 GB · 61%010 GB
Weights
4.6 GB
KV cache
1.0 GB
Runtime overhead
0.8 GB
Llama 3.1 8B at Q4_K_M leaves 4.0 GB spare on a RTX 3080 12GB. There is room to raise the context length or move up a quantisation level.
Generation109tok/s
Prompt processing1569tok/s
Max context40Ktokens
KV per 1K tokens0GB
Every quantisation of Llama 3.1 8B on a RTX 3080 12GB
Highlighted row is the highest quality that still fits at 8K context.
| Quantisation | bpw | Weights | Total | Verdict | Max ctx | tok/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 / BF16 | 16.00 | 15.0 GB | 16.8 GB | Won't fit | — | 5.41 |
| INT8 / W8A8 | 8.50 | 7.7 GB | 9.5 GB | Fits, but tight | 16K | 68.6 |
| Q8_0 (GGUF) | 8.50 | 7.7 GB | 9.5 GB | Fits, but tight | 16K | 68.6 |
| FP8 (E4M3) | 8.00 | 7.5 GB | 9.3 GB | Runs comfortably | 17K | 70.6 |
| Q6_K | 6.56 | 6.1 GB | 8.0 GB | Runs comfortably | 28K | 84.7 |
| AWQ 4-bit | 4.25 | 5.4 GB | 7.2 GB | Runs comfortably | 34K | 94.8 |
| GPTQ 4-bit | 4.25 | 5.4 GB | 7.2 GB | Runs comfortably | 34K | 94.8 |
| MXFP4 | 4.25 | 5.4 GB | 7.2 GB | Runs comfortably | 34K | 94.8 |
| Q5_K_M | 5.67 | 5.3 GB | 7.1 GB | Runs comfortably | 35K | 96.6 |
| Q5_K_S | 5.52 | 5.2 GB | 7.0 GB | Runs comfortably | 36K | 98.9 |
| Q4_K_M | 4.85 | 4.6 GB | 6.4 GB | Runs comfortably | 40K | 109 |
| Q4_K_S | 4.58 | 4.4 GB | 6.2 GB | Runs comfortably | 42K | 114 |
| Q4_0 | 4.55 | 4.4 GB | 6.2 GB | Runs comfortably | 42K | 115 |
| IQ4_XS | 4.25 | 4.1 GB | 5.9 GB | Runs comfortably | 44K | 121 |
| Q3_K_M | 3.91 | 3.8 GB | 5.7 GB | Runs comfortably | 46K | 128 |
| IQ3_M | 3.70 | 3.7 GB | 5.5 GB | Runs comfortably | 48K | 133 |
| IQ3_XXS | 3.06 | 3.2 GB | 5.0 GB | Runs comfortably | 52K | 151 |
| Q2_K | 2.63 | 2.8 GB | 4.6 GB | Runs comfortably | 55K | 167 |
| IQ2_XXS | 2.06 | 2.3 GB | 4.2 GB | Runs comfortably | 59K | 193 |
| IQ1_M | 1.75 | 2.1 GB | 3.9 GB | Runs comfortably | 61K | 211 |
Models on a RTX 3080 12GB
Q4_K_M at 8K context. Bandwidth sets the speed; capacity sets the ceiling.
| Model | Params | Weights | Verdict | Max ctx | tok/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek-R1 671B-A37B | 671B | 379.0 GB | Won't fit | — | 1.90 |
| Qwen3 235B-A22B | 235.1B | 132.8 GB | Won't fit | — | 3.09 |
| gpt-oss 120B-A5.1B | 116.8B | 66.0 GB | Won't fit | — | 13.8 |
| Llama 4 Scout 109B-A17B | 109B | 61.7 GB | Won't fit | — | 4.34 |
| Qwen2.5 72B | 72.7B | 41.2 GB | Won't fit | — | 1.11 |
| Llama 3.1 70B | 70.5B | 40.0 GB | Won't fit | — | 1.16 |
| Mixtral 8x7B | 46.7B | 26.4 GB | Won't fit | — | 7.16 |
| Command R 35B | 35.0B | 20.1 GB | Won't fit | — | 1.59 |
| Yi-1.5 34B | 34.4B | 19.5 GB | Won't fit | — | 3.04 |
| Qwen3 32B | 32.8B | 18.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 3.27 |
| Qwen2.5-Coder 32B | 32.8B | 18.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 3.27 |
| DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B | 32.8B | 18.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 3.27 |
| Qwen3 30B-A3B | 30.5B | 17.3 GB | Won't fit | — | 28.8 |
| Gemma 3 27B | 27.4B | 15.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 4.99 |
| Mistral Small 24B | 23.6B | 13.4 GB | Won't fit | — | 6.79 |
| gpt-oss 20B-A3.6B | 20.9B | 11.9 GB | Won't fit | — | 54.3 |
| Qwen3 14B | 14.8B | 8.5 GB | Won't fit | 8K | 46.7 |
| Phi-4 14B | 14.7B | 8.4 GB | Won't fit | 6K | 37.1 |
| Mistral NeMo 12B | 12.3B | 7.0 GB | Runs comfortably | 17K | 73.4 |
| Gemma 3 12B | 12.2B | 7.0 GB | Runs comfortably | 38K | 74.2 |
| GLM-4 9B | 9.4B | 5.4 GB | Runs comfortably | 109K | 100 |
| Qwen3 8B | 8.2B | 4.7 GB | Runs comfortably | 35K | 106 |
| Llama 3.1 8B | 8.0B | 4.6 GB | Runs comfortably | 40K | 109 |
| DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama 8B | 8.0B | 4.6 GB | Runs comfortably | 40K | 109 |
| Qwen2.5 7B | 7.6B | 4.4 GB | Runs comfortably | 97K | 121 |
| Mistral 7B v0.3 | 7.3B | 4.1 GB | Runs comfortably | 32K | 121 |
| Gemma 3 4B | 4.3B | 2.5 GB | Runs comfortably | 128K | 204 |
| Qwen3 4B | 4.0B | 2.3 GB | Runs comfortably | 53K | 191 |
| Llama 3.2 3B | 3.2B | 1.8 GB | Runs comfortably | 72K | 240 |
| Llama 3.2 1B | 1.2B | 0.7 GB | Runs comfortably | 128K | 634 |