Gemma 4 12B VRAM requirements

VRAM by quantization

Weights plus the KV cache for 8,192 tokens in FP16 and the runtime overhead (0.5 GB plus 10%). Each row opens the calculator with that setting. What the GGUF names mean.

KV cache at long context

8 of its 48 layers use full attention and 40 keep a sliding window of 1,024 tokens. Each extra token of context adds 8 KB of FP16 cache per request once the sliding windows are full. How the KV cache works.

Which GPUs can run Gemma 4 12B

With 8,192 tokens of context. Several GPUs means one tensor-parallel group of 2, 4 or 8 cards.

How fast Gemma 4 12B writes

Tokens per second for one request with 8,192 tokens of context, estimated from memory bandwidth. A dash means it does not fit on one card. Try other settings in the speed calculator.

Longest context on one GPU

How many tokens of context fit on a single card with one request and an FP16 KV cache. "Full" means the model's whole context window fits.

Model details

Parameters

12.0B (11,959,730,224)

Layers

8 of its 48 layers use full attention and 40 keep a sliding window of 1,024 tokens

Attention cache

1 KV heads × 512 (keys double as values)

Sliding-window layers

8 KV heads × 256

Context length

262,144 tokens

Published weights

22.3 GB (BF16)

On Hugging Face

google/gemma-4-12B-it

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