Is 16GB VRAM enough for Llama 4 Scout?

No. While Llama 4 Scout has 17B active parameters, it is a massive MoE model with 109B total parameters. It requires approx 64GB VRAM (e.g., Mac Studio Ultra or Dual RTX 4090) to run locally. For 16GB cards, we recommend DeepSeek R1 (14B) or Phi-4.

Can I run Llama 4 Maverick on RTX 5090?

Not natively. Llama 4 Maverick is a 400B parameter model. Even with the RTX 5090's 32GB VRAM, you would need heavily quantized CPU offloading (which is slow) or a cluster of GPUs. The 5090 is best suited for Llama 3.3 70B (Quantized) or Qwen 2.5 72B.

What is the difference between GGUF, EXL2, and AWQ?

GGUF is the most flexible format and allows running models larger than your VRAM by offloading to System RAM (great for Llama 4). EXL2 is the fastest format exclusive to NVIDIA GPUs but crashes if VRAM is full. AWQ is an older GPU-focused format.

Why is my local LLM generating text so slowly?

Slow generation typically means System RAM Offloading. Since GPU memory (VRAM) is ~20x faster than DDR5 RAM, spilling over causes a bottleneck. Use this calculator to find a smaller model (like Mistral Small 3) that fits entirely in VRAM.

Local LLM Readiness Calculator - Can I Run Llama 4, DeepSeek & Mistral?

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Affects KV cache size in VRAM (Exact GQA calc)

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Hardware Guide & FAQ

Yes, for the mid-sized models.

16GB VRAM is the recommended entry point for 2026. It allows you to run:

Llama 4 Scout (17B): Comfortably at Q4 quantization.
DeepSeek R1 Distill (14B): Runs perfectly with long context.
Mistral Small (22B): Requires efficient quantization (Q4) to fit.

However, for massive models like Llama 3.3 70B, 16GB (or even 24GB) is not enough. For those, you need 48GB+ VRAM (like RTX 6000 Ada) or a Dual-GPU setup (2x RTX 3090/4090).

These are different file formats for running models locally:

GGUF (Best for Beginners): The most flexible format. Works on CPU & GPU (perfect for offloading). Use this if you are unsure.
EXL2 (Fastest): Exclusive to NVIDIA GPUs. It's incredibly fast but requires the model to fit 100% in VRAM. It crashes if you run out of memory.
AWQ: An older GPU-focused format. Good for accuracy but less flexible than GGUF.

Slow generation usually means System RAM Offloading.

GPU memory (VRAM) is ultra-fast (1,000+ GB/s). System RAM is much slower (~60 GB/s).
If your model is 16GB and your GPU has 12GB, the remaining 4GB spills to your slow RAM, acting like a bottleneck.

The Fix: Use this calculator to find a smaller quantization (e.g., Q4_K_M) or reduce the Context Window until the entire model fits in VRAM (Green Result).

The 5090 is the current best consumer card, but NO.

With 32GB VRAM, the RTX 5090 can easily run every model up to 34B parameters (Gemma 2, Qwen 2.5) at full speed.

However, running full 70B models (like Llama 3.3 70B) requires **46GB VRAM** and will always result in significant **CPU Offloading** on the 5090. If you need full speed 70B, you must use a 48GB Pro card or a Dual-GPU setup.

Context is the model's "short-term memory".

8k (Standard): Enough for most chats. Low VRAM usage.
32k (Long Docs): Great for summarizing PDFs. Uses ~2-4GB extra VRAM.
128k (Extreme): Uses massive amounts of VRAM (KV Cache).

Tip: If you are out of memory, lowering context from 32k to 8k is often the easiest way to fix it without changing the model intelligence.