Yes, just — 0.1 GB spare

Mistral NeMo 12B at Q4_K_M fits your GeForce RTX 3080 entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 67 tokens per second. Past 8K the KV cache pushes it over — quantise the cache to q8_0, or step down a quantisation, to go longer.

Fully on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 6.9 GB Apache 2.0 Released Jul 2024

Multilingual 12B with a 128K window, built with NVIDIA. A roleplay and fiction favourite that refuses to die.

What hardware do I need for Mistral NeMo 12B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 6.9 GB
Weights 6.9 GB KV cache @ 8K 1.25 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 0.1 GB of 8.8 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
F16 22.7 GB 24.6 GB ~2.2 Reference 15.8 GB over
Q8_0 12.1 GB 13.9 GB ~6.4 −0.1% ppl 5.1 GB over
Q6_K 9.3 GB 11.2 GB ~12 −0.4% ppl 2.4 GB over
Q5_K_M 8.1 GB 9.9 GB ~22 −0.8% ppl 1.1 GB over
Q4_K_M 6.9 GB 8.7 GB 8K 67 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 5.6 GB 7.4 GB 16K 83 −5.4% ppl Fits
Q2_K 4.8 GB 6.6 GB 22K 97 −15% ppl Long context

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 99

The engine underneath most of the others. Every knob is exposed. More on llama.cpp.

01Download is 6.9 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02Close anything else holding VRAM. A browser with hardware acceleration can sit on 1–2 GB.
03Only 0.1 GB is spare, so a long system prompt can still push it over. Its real ceiling here is 8K context.
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