Artificial Intelligence
Local multimodal models: the VRAM arithmetic on a 16 GB card
Qwen3-VL 8B at Q4_K_M is 4.68 GiB of weights plus a 1.08 GiB vision tower, and its KV cache costs 144 KiB per token. At 8,192 tokens of context the total is around 7 GiB and fits comfortably in 16 GB; at the native 256K it would ask for 36 GiB of cache alone and fits on no consumer card.