AI Hardware & VRAM Benchmark Leaderboard

GPUs with 8GB of VRAM (such as the RTX 4060 8G or RTX 3070 8G) suffer critical limitations with modern models. Even a 7B model at 4-bit quantization consumes 4.8 GB for weights alone. Once 8k context KV cache and Windows desktop display overhead (0.8 GB) are added, 8GB cards instantly breach memory ceilings, triggering devastating PCIe throttling.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Blackwell architecture introduces GDDR7 memory operating at 1,792 GB/s bandwidth—a 78% increase over the RTX 4090 (1,008 GB/s). For DeepSeek R1 32B and Llama 3.3 70B, this doubles interactive generation speeds, achieving 40+ tokens per second on consumer hardware.

Apple Silicon (M2 Ultra 192GB, M3 Max 128GB) enables massive memory pools without multi-GPU cluster interconnects. While its memory bandwidth (400–800 GB/s) yields lower generation speeds than an RTX 4090, it is the only cost-effective consumer hardware capable of running the entire 671B DeepSeek R1 MoE model locally.