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gemma-3-12b-it

12.2 billion parameters.

Open in the calculator →

Architecturepublished data
Quick answer
gemma-3-12b-it needs about 8.68 GB at Q4_K_M — the format most people download — with 8,192 tokens of context. It fits entirely on 18 of 18 common devices, starting with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12 GB). What else fits in 12 GB. No hardware for it? Rent a GPU that runs it, priced live.

Sized at 8,192 tokens of context with the whole model in device memory, across 18 common devices. Speeds are estimates, not benchmarks.

Find the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, the smallest card listed here that holds it: Amazon ↗ · eBay (new and used) ↗Store links may pay us a commission. They never decide which card is suggested — the memory arithmetic does.

Configuration read from a mirror of a restricted repository

The official repository is google/gemma-3-12b-it (licence: gemma). Google's repository requires accepting the Gemma terms. This configuration is read from Unsloth's ungated copy; it is not byte-compared with Google's file. Vision inputs add memory not modelled here.

Weight-file size by format

FormatSizeRangeBasis
FP1624.4 GB17.1 GB – 24.6 GBsize range
Q8_013.0 GB9.06 GB – 15.0 GBsize range
Q6_K10.0 GB7.00 GB – 12.5 GBsize range
Q5_K_M8.71 GB5.87 GB – 12.5 GBsize range
Q5_08.51 GB5.87 GB – 12.5 GBsize range
Q4_K_M7.48 GB4.80 GB – 12.5 GBsize range
Q4_07.09 GB4.80 GB – 12.5 GBsize range
Q3_K_M6.10 GB3.67 GB – 12.5 GBsize range
Q2_K4.83 GB2.80 GB – 12.5 GBsize range

A file size is not the memory a run needs: the KV cache and the runtime reserve come on top, and the calculator adds both.

What the labels mean
published data
Read from a published source — a file's byte count, a model's configuration or a manufacturer's specification — or exact arithmetic on such values. Not a measurement on a machine.
reconstructed size
Weight size reconstructed from the pinned architecture, because no published file exists.
size range
Only a lower and an upper bound are claimed for this weight size.

Hardware ladder

Q4_K_M at 8,192 tokens · 18 of 18 devices hold it entirely
DeviceMemoryVerdictDecodeCalculator
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50708.68 GB of 12 GBfits~59 tok/sOpen →
AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 XT8.68 GB of 16 GBfits~65 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40808.68 GB of 16 GBfits~63 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50808.68 GB of 16 GBfits~85 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti8.68 GB of 16 GBfits~79 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB8.68 GB of 16 GBfits~40 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40908.68 GB of 24 GBfits~89 tok/sOpen →
AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XTX8.68 GB of 24 GBfits~97 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30908.68 GB of 24 GBfits~83 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50908.68 GB of 32 GBfits~158 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation8.68 GB of 48 GBfits~85 tok/sOpen →
Apple M4 Pro8.68 GB of 64 GBfits~28 tok/sAbout reading paceOpen →
Apple M5 Pro8.68 GB of 64 GBfits~31 tok/sOpen →
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S8.68 GB of 128 GBfits~26 tok/sAbout reading paceOpen →
Apple M3 Max8.68 GB of 128 GBfits~38 tok/sOpen →
Apple M4 Max8.68 GB of 128 GBfits~48 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA DGX Spark8.68 GB of 128 GBfits~24 tok/sAbout reading paceOpen →
Apple M2 Ultra8.68 GB of 192 GBfits~63 tok/sOpen →

Decode is a calibrated estimate from the published calibration; capacity is the manufacturer's published ceiling, not guaranteed free memory. Fitting in memory is not the same as loading: whether the runtime and version you have supports this architecture and format on that machine has not been tested here. Offloaded rows assume there is enough system RAM for the overflow — the calculator checks that against the RAM you declare. Each “Open” link keeps this model, format and context.

Run it in the cloud

Rent a GPU that runs gemma-3-12b-it

Every rentable machine that holds the whole model, from Vast.ai and RunPod, with this site's speed estimate for each and the provider's own price, read live. Cheapest first; sort by cost per token or speed instead, or switch the format.

Prices · 18:30 UTC, 22 Sept
28 configurations in stock · 5 out of stock
MachineSpeedPer hourPer M tokensWhereRent
1× RTX 306012 GBrecommendedcheapestbest value~31 tok/sFaster than you read$0.036$0.31Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.8% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 308010 GB~67 tok/sFaster than you read$0.082$0.34Vast.aiMarketplace · 98.3% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 4060 Ti 16GB16 GB~25 tok/sAbout reading pace$0.090$0.98Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.4% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 407012 GB~44 tok/sFaster than you read$0.096$0.60Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.8% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 309024 GB~82 tok/sFaster than you read$0.12$0.41Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.5% reliableRunPod $0.50/h Rent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 5060 Ti 16GB16 GB~39 tok/sFaster than you read$0.12$0.86Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.1% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 3080 Ti12 GB~80 tok/sFaster than you read$0.14$0.47Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.9% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 507012 GB~59 tok/sFaster than you read$0.18$0.82Vast.aiMarketplace · 98.3% reliableRent on Vast.ai

No GPU at all

Use gemma-3-12b-it by the token

For one person chatting, that is about 3.1× cheaper than the best-value rented card above ($0.31 per million tokens). A rented GPU pays off when you keep it busy — many requests batched together, long agent runs — or when the data must stay on a machine you control, or the exact file you want is not served anywhere.

First time renting a GPU? How it works, in four steps
  1. Create an account and add credit. Both providers are prepaid: $10 is enough to try any card on this page for hours. A new RunPod account that arrives through a referral link gets a one-time $5 credit when it first adds $10.
  2. Pick the card and the count shown here, and a template: llama.cpp or vLLM for an OpenAI-compatible API, or one with a web chat if you only want to talk to the model. “How to launch it” below gives the exact image and command.
  3. Wait for the download. The weights are fetched on the machine; tens of gigabytes take a few minutes on a data-centre connection. You pay by the second from the moment it starts.
  4. Stop it when you are done. A running machine bills even when idle. A stopped one costs nothing per hour, though its disk is usually still billed until you delete it.
How to launch it

No Q4_K_M file of gemma-3-12b-it is catalogued here, so there is no exact command to vouch for. Start the machine from the llama.cpp server image ghcr.io/ggml-org/llama.cpp:server-cuda and point -hf at a Q4_K_M build from the publisher or a quantizer you trust — search Hugging Face for one. Check its file size against the memory figure on this page before you rent.

Every machine holds the whole model at Q4_K_M and 8,192 tokens of context, no offload. Speeds are this site’s single-stream decode estimates; prices are what each provider’s own API quoted, on-demand, for the whole machine. Vast hosts below 98% measured reliability are left out.

Referral links Vast.ai, RunPod and Novita pay us a share of what you spend if you sign up through these buttons. It costs you nothing, and it never decides an order or a recommendation: both are computed from the live price and the speed, and options that pay us nothing are listed and recommended on the same terms. How we rank

Buying a card instead, or paying by the token? Compare a year of gemma-3-12b-it three ways →

Under the hood

Architecture, read from the publisher’s file

The numbers every figure above is computed from, with the file they came from.

Architecture

✓ Architecture read from the mirror's config.json

Retrieved 2026-09-13 at pinned commit 9478e665381f; parameter count from the safetensors index at the same revision.

Architecture
gemma3_text
Layers
48
Hidden size
3,840
Attention heads
16
KV heads
8
Head dimension
256
Feed-forward width
15,360
Vocabulary
262,208
Context ceiling
131,072
Sliding window
1,024
RoPE theta
1,000,000

Where the memory goes

tokenembedding× 48 decoder blocksGrouped-query attention16 query · 8 KV headswindow 1,024Feed-forwardone networkall activeoutputprojectiongrows with contextfixed per token

Grouped-query attention shares each key/value head across 2 query heads, so the KV cache is 50% of what multi-head attention would need at the same context.

This is a multimodal checkpoint (vision); the diagram and memory sizing above cover the text decoder. Encoder/audio/image activations are not included in the KV or weight figures.

Open the exact config.json this page was read from (the mirror) ↗

More from Google

gemma-4-12B-itgemma-4-26B-A4B-itgemma-4-31B-itgemma-4-E2B-itgemma-4-E4B-itgemma-2-27b-itgemma-2-2b-itgemma-2-9b-it

Use this answer in your own product

As JSON, from the API
curl -s https://llmbottleneck.com/v1/analyze \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLMB_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"unsloth-gemma-3-12b-it","quantization":"Q4_K_M","context":8192,"hardware":"nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090"}'

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<script src="https://llmbottleneck.com/widget.js"
  data-model="unsloth-gemma-3-12b-it" data-quantization="Q4_K_M"
  data-hardware="nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090" data-context="8192"></script>

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Citing this page

LLM Bottleneck. “gemma-3-12b-it VRAM and hardware requirements.” Architecture from unsloth/gemma-3-12b-it at revision 9478e665381f, retrieved 2026-09-13. https://llmbottleneck.com/models/unsloth-gemma-3-12b-it

Every figure above is either the published value or a reconstruction whose measured error is on the accuracy page.

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catalogue 2026-10-03models 327devices 135