Yes, just — 0.9 GB spare

Ornith 1.5 9B at Q4_K_M fits your GeForce RTX 4060 Ti entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 33 tokens per second. Past 35K 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 · 5.3 GB MIT Released 19 Aug 2026 New this week

The small Ornith: a coding-agent reasoning build on the Qwen3.5 9B architecture. Same VRAM as its base, thinks before every answer.

What hardware do I need for Ornith 1.5 9B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 5.3 GB
Weights 5.3 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.25 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 0.9 GB of 7.0 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
F16 17.5 GB 18.4 GB ~2.9 Reference 11.4 GB over
Q8_0 9.3 GB 10.2 GB ~8.2 −0.1% ppl 3.2 GB over
Q6_K 7.2 GB 8.0 GB ~16 −0.4% ppl 1.0 GB over
Q5_K_M 6.2 GB 7.1 GB 6K ~27 −0.8% ppl 0.1 GB over
Q4_K_M 5.3 GB 6.1 GB 35K 33 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 4.3 GB 5.1 GB 67K 41 −5.4% ppl Long context
Q2_K 3.7 GB 4.5 GB 87K 48 −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. Only 8 of its 32 blocks keep a per-token KV cache; the rest are linear-attention, Mamba or convolution blocks with a fixed-size state.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 99

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

01Download is 5.3 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 0.9 GB is spare, so a long system prompt can still push it over. Its real ceiling here is 35K context.
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