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Computed

Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct on a GeForce RTX 5090

Yes, quantized. Q6_K is the largest that fits, leaving room for 18k tokens of context.

Verdict

Q6_K

29.4 GiB usable of 32 GB

Weights (Q4_K_M)

18.5 GiB

61.0 GiB at FP16 · 32.8B params · 6 of 6 quant rows are measured files

KV cache

256.0 KiB per token at FP16

64 layers × 8 KV heads × 128 dimensions

Speed ceiling

62 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 — 6 of these6 rows are measured from bartowski/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-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 32k tokens this model was trained to address.

29.4 GiB usableFP16 / BF16 · 61.0 GiBQ8_0 · 32.4 GiBQ6_K · 25.0 GiBQ5_K_M · 21.7 GiBQ4_K_M · 18.5 GiBQ3_K_M · 14.8 GiB
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.
PrecisionBits/weightWeightsSourceFitsMax contextCeiling
FP16 / BF1616.0061.0 GiBmeasured file−31.6 GiB2.4 tok/s offloaded
Q8_08.5032.4 GiBmeasured file−3.0 GiB13.0 tok/s offloaded
Q6_K6.5625.0 GiBmeasured fileyes18,02362 tok/s
Q5_K_M5.6821.7 GiBmeasured fileyes31,84871 tok/s
Q4_K_M4.8518.5 GiBmeasured fileyes32,768 (model cap)81 tok/s
Q3_K_M3.8914.8 GiBmeasured fileyes32,768 (model cap)99 tok/s

What the context actually costs

The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 64 · 8 · 128 · 2 B = 256.0 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 40 query heads, which divides the cache by 5 against multi-head attention.

ContextKV cache (FP16)KV cache (8-bit)Plus Q4_K_M weights
4,0961.0 GiB512 MiB19.5 GiB
8,1922.0 GiB1.0 GiB20.5 GiB
32,7688.0 GiB4.0 GiB26.5 GiB

The speed ceiling, and where it comes from

Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At Q6_K that is 25.0 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 62 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
32,763,876,352
Layers
64
Attention / KV heads
40 / 8
Head dimension
128
Trained context
32,768
Checkpoint as published
61.0 GiB

Read from Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. 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 Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct need?

61.0 GiB for the weights at FP16 — 32.8B parameters at two bytes each — and 18.5 GiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 256.0 KiB per token of context, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 2.0 GiB. A GeForce RTX 5090 makes 29.4 GiB of its 32 GB available on the assumption below.

Can a GeForce RTX 5090 run Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct?

Yes, quantized. Q6_K is the largest that fits, leaving room for 18k tokens of context. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 29.4 GiB of usable memory.

How fast will Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct run on a GeForce RTX 5090?

No faster than 62 tokens/second at Q6_K, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads all 25.0 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 Qwen2.5-Coder 32B 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 64 layers and 8 key/value heads of 128 dimensions, shared across 40 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 5. That works out at 256.0 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.