Model Sizes and Hardware Requirements

All sizes free to download1 min read

0M+

Total downloads

0K+

Community variants

0

Elo rating (27B on LMArena)

VRAM (Q4)MultimodalBest For
Gemma 3 270M< 0.5GB (CPU)Text onlyClassification, extraction, edge devices
Gemma 3 1B< 1GB (CPU)Text onlyMobile, simple Q&A, fine tuned tasks
Gemma 3 4B~3.4GBText + ImageLocal dev, conversation, coding, docs
Gemma 3 12B~8GBText + ImageProfessional local, quality sensitive tasks
Gemma 3 27B~16GBText + ImageFrontier open model, complex reasoning

Recommended hardware by model

📱
270M / 1B

Any modern device. Smartphones, Raspberry Pi, browsers via WebAssembly, or any CPU. No GPU needed.

💻
4B

Modern laptop or desktop. Apple M1+, any 8GB+ RAM machine. Optional GPU accelerates generation but is not required.

🖥️
12B

Dedicated GPU recommended. RTX 3060 12GB, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, Apple M2 Pro+, or equivalent.

27B

High end GPU required. RTX 4090 24GB, A6000 48GB, Apple M3 Max, or multi GPU setup.

Start with 4B

For most developers exploring Gemma for the first time, the 4B model is the ideal starting point. It offers multimodal capabilities, fits on virtually any modern laptop at Q4 quantization, and provides strong enough quality for general tasks. Scale up to 12B or 27B only if you need higher quality and have the hardware to support it.