How much VRAM does Gemma 4 12B IT need?

About 8.2 GB at Q4_K_M with 4K of context and batch 1, rising to roughly 8.6 GB at 32K. That figure is weights plus KV cache plus a 10% activation buffer, calculated from the model's architecture rather than measured on a card.

Will Gemma 4 12B IT run on a 10GB GPU?

Yes — at Q4_K_M and 4K context it needs about 8.2 GB, which leaves 1.8 GB spare on a Arc B570 10G, or on any of the other 10 GB cards here (2 in all). That is the smallest size in this index that clears it comfortably; 67 of 78 do.

Which quantization of Gemma 4 12B IT should I use?

No published quality comparison exists for this model, so pick by footprint: Q4_K_M is the level most people run, and a higher bits-per-weight level is more faithful. All 2 levels in the index are Q4_K_M, Q8_0.

Gemma 4 12B IT

12B

Google Gemma 4

Google's mid-sized Gemma 4, released in June: a dense 12B with a 256K window. It takes text, images and audio without separate encoders — the raw inputs go straight into the one decoder. Only 8 of its 48 layers cache the full context, each with a single wide KV head, so the cache stays small: about 1 GB at 32K and 4.5 GB at the full 256K. At Q4 that is about 8.6 GB at 32K and 10.3 GB at 128K, both comfortable on a 12 GB card; a 16 GB card holds the whole window comfortably, and an 8 GB card is tight even at 4K. Sizes use the calculator's generic rates — no GGUF file size could be checked, and no per-level quality loss has been published.

⬇ 1.7M HF downloads♥ 1674 likesgoogle/gemma-4-12B-it· stats from 10/19/2026

Consumer GPUMac / Apple Silicon

262K

Max Context

Quant Variants

GGUF Q8_0

Best Quality

—

Accuracy Retained

Calculate VRAM Hugging Face Compare

Quantization Variants

Per-quant VRAM, quality loss, and inference speed on RTX 4090

Measured = run on this site · Estimated = not run here: calculated, or a figure this site has not verified · Community = public reports

Format	Level	BPW	VRAM	PPL Loss	Speed	Source	Actions
GGUF	Q4_K_M	4.85	7.2 GB	—	—	Estimated	Calc HF
GGUF	Q8_0	8.5	12.7 GB	—	—	Estimated	Calc HF

Similar models

Compare with Gemma 4

26B-A4B

Gemma 4 26B-A4B IT

Google Gemma 4

Consumer GPUPro GPU

15.3 GBmin VRAM—accuracy

Google's Gemma 4 mixture-of-experts model: about 25B parameters in the text model, roughly 4B active per token, a 256K window and image input. Only 5 of its 30 layers keep a cache that grows with context, and those use fewer, wider heads, so the cache stays small — about 0.9 GB at 32K and 5.3 GB at the full 256K. At Q4 that is about 17 GB at 32K: comfortable on a 24 GB card, which can still load the whole window (tight). A 16 GB card is just too small. Sizes use the calculator's generic rates — no GGUF file size could be checked, and no per-level quality loss has been published.

31B

Gemma 4 31B IT

Google Gemma 4

Consumer GPUPro GPU

18.6 GBmin VRAM—accuracy

Google's dense Gemma 4 flagship: about 31B parameters, a 256K window and image input. Only 10 of its 60 layers cache the full context, and those use four wide KV heads, so 128K of context adds about 11 GB of cache where a conventional 60-layer design would need about 120 GB. At Q4 it is about 21 GB at 4K — on a 24 GB card that is right at the edge of comfortable, and tight from 32K. A 32 GB card holds 32K comfortably. Sizes use the calculator's generic rates — no GGUF file size could be checked, and no per-level quality loss has been published.

E4B

Gemma 4 E4B IT

Google Gemma 4

Consumer GPUMac / Apple Silicon

4.6 GBmin VRAM—accuracy

Google's on-device Gemma 4: about 4.7B parameters doing the work plus a 2.8B per-layer embedding table, a 128K window, and image and audio input. Only 4 of its 42 layers keep a cache that grows with context, so the full 128K window costs about 2.0 GB of cache. At Q4 it is about 4.9 GB at 4K and 7.0 GB at the full window — an 8 GB card runs it comfortably at everyday context lengths. Sizes here count the whole model in GPU memory, which is what a Mac or a full GPU load uses; llama.cpp keeps the embedding table in system RAM instead, so on a discrete card it needs roughly 1.6 GB less VRAM than shown at Q4. Sizes use the calculator's generic rates — no GGUF file size could be checked.

E2B

Gemma 4 E2B IT

Google Gemma 4

Consumer GPUMac / Apple Silicon

2.8 GBmin VRAM—accuracy

The smallest Gemma 4: about 2.3B parameters doing the work plus a 2.3B per-layer embedding table, a 128K window, and image and audio input. Its cache barely grows — 3 of 35 layers track the full context, about 0.8 GB at 128K. At Q4 it is about 3.0 GB at 4K and 3.8 GB at the full window — comfortable on any card in this index and on an 8 GB Mac. Sizes count the whole model in GPU memory; llama.cpp keeps the embedding table in system RAM, so on a discrete card it needs roughly 1.3 GB less VRAM than shown at Q4. Sizes use the calculator's generic rates — no GGUF file size could be checked.

Running Gemma 4 12B IT locally

At Q4_K_M and 4K of context, Gemma 4 12B IT needs about 8.2 GB — 6.9 GB of weights, 0.53 GB of KV cache and a 0.7 GB activation buffer. The smallest cards in this index that clear that comfortably are 10 GB ones — 2 of them, from the Arc B570 10G up — and 67 of the 78 cards here do. These are calculated figures, not measurements: the estimate stops counting a card as comfortable at 88% of its VRAM, which is roughly the room a desktop session needs.

What longer context costs

Going from 4K to 32K adds about 0.44 GB, taking the total to 8.6 GB. That is gentler than the parameter count suggests: only 8 of 48 layers keep a KV cache that grows with context, and 40 more cap theirs at a sliding window, so the cache scales at a fraction of the usual rate. The model's native window is 256K; holding all of it at Q4_K_M would need about 12 GB.

Which build to download

This index only tracks Gemma 4 12B IT in GGUF, across 2 levels (Q4_K_M, Q8_0). No per-level perplexity sweep has been published for this model, so the quality column is empty rather than estimated — within one model, more bits per weight is the only ordering the data supports. No throughput has been measured for this model on this site's hardware. GGUF runs on llama.cpp and Ollama across NVIDIA, AMD and Apple silicon; AWQ and GPTQ target vLLM on CUDA and ROCm; EXL2 is ExLlamaV2 — CUDA only, and now archived, so local use rather than serving.

Common questions

How much VRAM does Gemma 4 12B IT need?: About 8.2 GB at Q4_K_M with 4K of context and batch 1, rising to roughly 8.6 GB at 32K. That figure is weights plus KV cache plus a 10% activation buffer, calculated from the model's architecture rather than measured on a card.
Will Gemma 4 12B IT run on a 10GB GPU?: Yes — at Q4_K_M and 4K context it needs about 8.2 GB, which leaves 1.8 GB spare on a Arc B570 10G, or on any of the other 10 GB cards here (2 in all). That is the smallest size in this index that clears it comfortably; 67 of 78 do.
Which quantization of Gemma 4 12B IT should I use?: No published quality comparison exists for this model, so pick by footprint: Q4_K_M is the level most people run, and a higher bits-per-weight level is more faithful. All 2 levels in the index are Q4_K_M, Q8_0.

Where this model fits

Sized at Q4_K_M with a 4K context window, smallest card first. Comfortable means the estimate uses at most 88% of the memory.

Runs comfortably on: Arc B570 10G10GB · +1.8 RTX 3080 10G10GB · +1.8 RTX 3060 12G12GB · +3.9 Radeon RX 6700 XT12GB · +3.9 Radeon RX 7700 XT12GB · +3.9
Tight but possible: RTX 40608GB RTX 4060 Ti 8G8GB Radeon RX 9060 XT 8G8GB
Just misses: Mac M1 8G+2.2GB over Mac M3 8G+2.2GB over
Ships in: GGUF
Try it yourself: Size it in the calculator Generate the run command

How to actually run this

Deployment guides for this model and this class of hardware.

This page's figures change when the model or the runtime does.Last updated 2026-10-19 RSS → /feed.xml