12GB VRAM

Radeon RX 7700 XT — what LLMs can it run?

56 of 110 indexed models fit comfortably in 12GB at 4K context, each at the highest-quality quant that still leaves headroom.

The short answer for Radeon RX 7700 XT

12 GB, 432 GB/s GDDR6. 56 of 110 models in this index fit comfortably at 4K context; 58 load at all.

Biggest that fits
DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct — 10.1 GB at Q4_K_M — 1.9 GB spare at 4K, so longer context comes out of a thin margin.
Room to grow
Qwen2-VL 7B Instruct — 5.5 GB at Q4_K_M — under 60% of the card, which leaves 6.5 GB for a long context window or a second process.
Speed ceiling
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q4_K_M reads 4.6 GB of weights per token, so 432 GB/s puts a hard ceiling near 94 tok/s. That is arithmetic on two published numbers, not a benchmark — real throughput lands below it. No run on this card has been measured here, so there is nothing to compare the ceiling against.
The wall you will hit
Backend coverage, not capacity. At 432 GB/s the memory system is competitive with NVIDIA cards of the same size; what varies is whether your runtime has a working ROCm build for your kernel and card. llama.cpp and vLLM both ship official ROCm support — this is a setup question, not a hardware ceiling.
Best local LLM for 12GB

14B · 17

Radeon RX 7700 XT — what LLMs can it run? — 14B
ModelQuantEst. VRAMHeadroomtok/s
DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct16B-A2.4BQ4_K_M10.08 GB+1.9 GB≤313Ceiling
DeepSeek-V2-Lite Chat16B-A2.4BQ4_K_M10.08 GB+1.9 GB≤313Ceiling
StarCoder2 15B15BQ4_K_M10.19 GB+1.8 GB≤50Ceiling
Qwen3 14B Instruct14BQ4_K_M10.04 GB+2 GB≤51Ceiling
Qwen2.5 14B Instruct14BQ4_K_M10.14 GB+1.9 GB≤51Ceiling
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B14BQ4_K_M10.14 GB+1.9 GB≤51Ceiling
Phi-4 14B14BQ4_K_M10.17 GB+1.8 GB≤51Ceiling
Phi-3 Medium 14B Instruct14BQ4_K_M9.73 GB+2.3 GB≤54Ceiling
Mistral Nemo 12B Instruct12BQ4_K_M8.42 GB+3.6 GB≤61Ceiling
Gemma 3 12B IT12BQ5_K_M9.84 GB+2.2 GB≤52Ceiling
Mellum2.1 12B-A2.5B Thinking12B-A2.5BQ4_K_M8.59 GB+3.4 GB≤273Ceiling
Stable LM 2 12B Chat12BQ4_K_M8.35 GB+3.7 GB≤62Ceiling
Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct11BQ4_K_M7.66 GB+4.3 GB≤68Ceiling
Solar 10.7B Instruct11BQ4_K_M7.6 GB+4.4 GB≤70Ceiling
Falcon 3 10B Instruct10BQ4_K_M7.28 GB+4.7 GB≤72Ceiling
Gemma 2 9B Instruct9BQ4_K_M7.3 GB+4.7 GB≤81Ceiling
Qwen3.5 9B9BQ8_010.37 GB+1.6 GB≤46Ceiling

7B · 25

Radeon RX 7700 XT — what LLMs can it run? — 7B
ModelQuantEst. VRAMHeadroomtok/s
GLM-4-9B-Chat9BQ8_010.16 GB+1.8 GB≤48Ceiling
Qwen3-VL 8B Instruct8BQ8_010.39 GB+1.6 GB≤49Ceiling
Granite 4.2 8B8BQ8_010.45 GB+1.6 GB≤49Ceiling
Ministral 3 8B Instruct8BQ8_010.02 GB+2 GB≤50Ceiling
Qwen2-VL 7B Instruct7BQ4_K_M5.49 GB+6.5 GB≤91Ceiling
Granite 3.1 8B Instruct8BQ4_K_M5.88 GB+6.1 GB≤92Ceiling
Qwen3 8B Instruct8BQ6_K7.64 GB+4.4 GB≤68Ceiling
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct8BQ8_09.47 GB+2.5 GB≤53Ceiling
Nous Hermes 3 Llama 3.1 8B8BQ4_K_M5.64 GB+6.4 GB≤94Ceiling
Aya 23 8B8BQ4_K_M5.64 GB+6.4 GB≤94Ceiling
OpenChat 3.6 8B8BQ4_K_M5.64 GB+6.4 GB≤94Ceiling
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B8BQ5_K_M6.51 GB+5.5 GB≤80Ceiling
InternLM2 7B Chat7BQ4_K_M5.45 GB+6.6 GB≤97Ceiling
Qwen2.5 7B Instruct7BQ6_K6.77 GB+5.2 GB≤73Ceiling
Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct7BQ4_K_M5.07 GB+6.9 GB≤98Ceiling
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B7BQ4_K_M5.07 GB+6.9 GB≤98Ceiling
Gemma 4 E4B ITE4BQ8_08.46 GB+3.5 GB≤57Ceiling
OLMo 2 7B Instruct7BQ8_010.3 GB+1.7 GB≤59Ceiling
OLMo 3 7B Instruct7BQ8_010.3 GB+1.7 GB≤59Ceiling
WizardLM-2 7B7BQ4_K_M5.14 GB+6.9 GB≤104Ceiling
Mistral 7B Instruct v0.37BQ6_K6.75 GB+5.3 GB≤77Ceiling
Zephyr 7B Beta7BQ6_K6.75 GB+5.3 GB≤77Ceiling
Gemma 4 E2B ITE2BQ8_05.2 GB+6.8 GB≤92Ceiling
Qwen3.5 4B4BQ8_04.97 GB+7 GB≤98Ceiling
Gemma 3 4B IT4BQ8_05.05 GB+7 GB≤100Ceiling

≤3B · 14

Radeon RX 7700 XT — what LLMs can it run? — ≤3B
ModelQuantEst. VRAMHeadroomtok/s
Qwen3 4B Instruct4BQ6_K4.05 GB+8 GB≤138Ceiling
Phi-4 Mini Instruct3.8BQ8_04.81 GB+7.2 GB≤111Ceiling
Phi-3.5 Mini Instruct3.8BQ8_05.89 GB+6.1 GB≤112Ceiling
Granite 4.2 3B3BQ8_04.41 GB+7.6 GB≤117Ceiling
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct3BQ8_04.05 GB+8 GB≤133Ceiling
Qwen2.5 3B Instruct3BQ8_03.59 GB+8.4 GB≤138Ceiling
SmolLM3 3B3BQ8_03.73 GB+8.3 GB≤139Ceiling
Gemma 2 2B Instruct2BQ8_03.34 GB+8.7 GB≤164Ceiling
Qwen3.5 2B2BQ8_02.23 GB+9.8 GB≤218Ceiling
Qwen3 1.7B Instruct1.7BQ8_02.39 GB+9.6 GB≤248Ceiling
Qwen2.5 1.5B Instruct1.5BQ8_01.83 GB+10.2 GB≤279Ceiling
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct1BQ8_01.51 GB+10.5 GB≤346Ceiling
Qwen3.5 0.8B0.8BQ8_00.94 GB+11.1 GB≤533Ceiling
Qwen2.5 0.5B Instruct0.5BQ8_00.6 GB+11.4 GB≤882Ceiling

How this list is built

Each row is the lowest-perplexity-loss quant of that model whose estimated total — weights plus KV cache at 4K context plus activation buffer — uses at most 88% of the card. That is the calculator's "green" threshold, so every row here has real headroom rather than only just fitting. Raise the context length and the list shortens; the calculator lets you check any combination directly. The speed column is this card: a measured run, a range scaled from this card's own Llama 2 7B benchmark, or a bandwidth ceiling. A figure that only exists for the RTX 4090 is labelled as that card.

A further 2 models load but with no headroom to spare (up to 105% of VRAM) — the Quant Hub’s GPU chips count those too, which is why its number is higher.

Measured on this card

No benchmark runs in this index were recorded on a Radeon RX 7700 XT. Every figure on this page is calculated from the model architecture and the quant level — treat them as estimates, not measurements.

Cards with the same budget

What fits is decided by memory, so every 12GB card of this type returns the same list. These pages are not different answers — they differ in throughput, which this index does not measure per card.

Setup guides for this card

Step-by-step guides written for the Radeon RX 7700 XT's runtime or memory size, with the commands and the checks that prove the model is running on the card.

Stepping up

A Radeon RX 9070 XT (16GB) fits 7 more of the indexed models than this card. Radeon RX 9070 XT →

Common questions

What is the best local LLM for a Radeon RX 7700 XT?

For everyday use, Qwen2-VL 7B Instruct at Q4_K_M — about 5.5 GB of the card's 12 GB at 4K context, leaving 6.5 GB for a longer window. If you want the largest thing that will load, that is DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct at Q4_K_M (10.1 GB, 1.9 GB spare). "Best" here means best fit for the memory budget — this index does not run task benchmarks, so it cannot tell you which model is smarter.

Can a Radeon RX 7700 XT run InternLM2 20B Chat?

No. Its smallest build here, Q4_K_M, needs about 13.4 GB and this card has 12.0 GB usable — short by 1.4 GB before any context beyond 4K. The largest model this card does clear is DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct.

How many tokens per second does a Radeon RX 7700 XT do on an 8B model at Q4?

This index has no measured run on this card, so it does not publish a figure. What can be stated from specifications: generating a token requires reading every weight once, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q4_K_M is 4.6 GB of weights, and this card moves 432 GB/s — a ceiling near 94 tok/s. Batch size, context length, the runtime and how much of the model sits in cache all take you below it.

Radeon RX 7700 XT or RTX 3080 Ti for local LLMs?

They hold the same models: 12 GB against 12 GB fits 56 and 56 of 110 respectively at 4K. The difference is throughput — 432 GB/s against 912 GB/s, a 2.1× gap in how fast the weights can be read, which is what token generation is bound by. The RTX 3080 Ti generates faster on any model both can hold.

56 of 110 indexed models fit comfortably in 12GB at 4K context, each at the highest-quality quant that still leaves headroom.

This page's figures change when the model or the runtime does.Last updated 2026-10-18 RSS → /feed.xml