Computed

Llama 3.2 1B Instruct on a GeForce RTX 5090

Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 128k tokens of context.

Change the numbers →Llama 3.2 1B Instruct on every card GeForce RTX 5090 across every model

Verdict

Fits at FP16

29.4 GiB usable of 32 GB

Weights (Q4_K_M)

770 MiB

2.3 GiB at FP16 · 1.2B params · 5 of 6 quant rows are measured files

KV cache

32.0 KiB per token at FP16

16 layers × 8 KV heads × 64 dimensions

Speed ceiling

654 tok/s

1792 GB/s ÷ bytes read per token

Every quant, against this card

Weight bytes are the size of the real published file wherever one exists — 5 of these6 rows are measured from bartowski/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-GGUF, the rest computed from the parameter count. Max context is what the KV cache can grow to in whatever memory the weights leave behind, capped at the 128k tokens this model was trained to address.

Bars are the weight bytes at each precision; the dashed line is the usable memory of a GeForce RTX 5090. Drawn from the computed byte counts, not sketched.

Precision	Bits/weight	Weights	Source	Fits	Max context	Ceiling
FP16 / BF16	16.00	2.3 GiB	measured file	yes	131,072 (model cap)	654 tok/s
Q8_0	8.55	1.2 GiB	measured file	yes	131,072 (model cap)	1127 tok/s
Q6_K	6.61	974 MiB	measured file	yes	131,072 (model cap)	1389 tok/s
Q5_K_M	5.90	869 MiB	measured file	yes	131,072 (model cap)	1519 tok/s
Q4_K_M	5.23	770 MiB	measured file	yes	131,072 (model cap)	1665 tok/s
Q3_K_M	3.91	576 MiB	nominal	yes	131,072 (model cap)	2054 tok/s

What the context actually costs

The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 16 · 8 · 64 · 2 B = 32.0 KiB. It depends on the key/value head count, not the attention-head count and not the parameter count. This model shares 8 KV heads across 32 query heads, which divides the cache by 4 against multi-head attention.

Context	KV cache (FP16)	KV cache (8-bit)	Plus Q4_K_M weights
4,096	128 MiB	64 MiB	898 MiB
8,192	256 MiB	128 MiB	1.0 GiB
32,768	1.0 GiB	512 MiB	1.8 GiB
131,072	4.0 GiB	2.0 GiB	4.8 GiB

The speed ceiling, and where it comes from

Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At FP16 / BF16 that is 2.3 GiB, plus a pass over the KV cache. A GeForce RTX 5090 moves 1792 GB/s (512-bit × 28 Gbps), so the arithmetic ceiling is 654 tok/s. Treat it as a bound, not an estimate: attention overhead, kernel launches and imperfect memory access keep real runtimes at roughly 60–80% of it, and nothing pushes past it.

Where these numbers come from

The model

Parameters: 1,235,814,400
Layers: 16
Attention / KV heads: 32 / 8
Head dimension: 64
Trained context: 131,072
Checkpoint as published: 2.3 GiB

Read from unsloth/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct — an ungated mirror of meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct, whose own config cannot be fetched without an access token. The parameter count is the Hub's own total over the tensor shapes, not a figure taken from the model's name.

The accelerator

Memory: 32 GB GDDR7
Bandwidth: 1792 GB/s
Bus: 512-bit × 28 Gbps
Assumed usable: 92% → 29.4 GiB

Capacity and bandwidth from the vendor's specification. The bandwidth figure is checked against the bus width and data rate it derives from. The usable fraction is an assumption, not a spec: a driver context, compute workspace and any attached display come out of the same pool before a weight is loaded.

Questions this pairing answers

How much VRAM does Llama 3.2 1B Instruct need?

2.3 GiB for the weights at FP16 — 1.2B parameters at two bytes each — and 770 MiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 32.0 KiB per token of context, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 256 MiB. A GeForce RTX 5090 makes 29.4 GiB of its 32 GB available on the assumption below.

Can a GeForce RTX 5090 run Llama 3.2 1B Instruct?

Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 128k tokens of context. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 29.4 GiB of usable memory.

How fast will Llama 3.2 1B Instruct run on a GeForce RTX 5090?

No faster than 654 tokens/second at FP16 / BF16, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads all 2.3 GiB of weights plus the cache, and this card moves 1792 GB/s. That division is the ceiling — no kernel, runtime or driver beats it, and a real runtime typically reaches 60–80% of it.

Why does the context length change how much memory Llama 3.2 1B Instruct needs?

Because the KV cache holds one key and one value vector per token, per layer, for the whole conversation, and it is allocated separately from the weights. This model has 16 layers and 8 key/value heads of 64 dimensions, shared across 32 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 4. That works out at 32.0 KiB per token. Parameter count tells you nothing about this number.

The same model on a different card

A different model on the same card

All 62 models on GeForce RTX 5090 →

Method and limits. Weight bytes are the byte size of the real published file wherever one exists, and the model's exact parameter count times the published llama.cpp bits-per-weight where it does not. That distinction is on every row above and it matters at both ends: a sub-1B model's Q4_K_M file runs a third larger than the nominal figure because k-quants keep its embedding tables at higher precision, and an already-4-bit release cannot be quantized upward at all. The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim · bytes per token, summed over layers with each sliding-window layer capped at its window. The speed figure is a roofline bound, not a benchmark: bandwidth divided by bytes read per token, which no runtime exceeds and every runtime falls short of. The usable fraction of card memory is an assumption: 92% here, which is what this lane assumes for a dedicated card — the other class assumes 75%, so it is not one number applied to every device. That is the only assumed input on this page; every other figure is computed from the model config and the card's published specification. Nothing on this page is written by a language model. Architecture from the model's published config, fetched 2026-08-07.