Can the RTX 4090 run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?
Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning fits the RTX 4090's 24 GB at Q4_K_M (about 11.8 GB needed), running at an estimated 63 tok/s. There's room for up to Q8_0 if you want higher quality.
Every quantization
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (17.8B) on 24 GB
| Quant | Weights | Needs | Fit | Est. speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 10 GB | 11.8 GB | Fits easily | ~63 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | 13 GB | 14.8 GB | Fits | ~48 tok/s |
| Q8_0 | 19 GB | 20.8 GB | Tight | ~33 tok/s |
| FP16 | 36 GB | 37.8 GB | Too big | - |
Estimates. Needs = weights + 1.8 GB for KV cache and runtime at modest context. Speed is single-stream decode scaled from the RTX 4090's 1008 GB/s bandwidth (XiongjieDai/GPU-Benchmarks-on-LLM-Inference). Long contexts need more memory and run slower.
Compare
Same model, other hardware - and other models on this card
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on other hardware
- RTX 5090~103 tok/s
- RTX 5090 D~103 tok/s
- RTX 6000D~90 tok/s
- RTX 3090~55 tok/s
- Radeon RX 7900 XTX~55 tok/s
- RTX 5080~55 tok/s
- RTX 3080 Ti~52 tok/s
- RTX 5080 Mobile~51 tok/s
Also runs on the RTX 4090
- OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT-QLoRA~35 tok/s
- Qwen3.6 27B~39 tok/s
- Qwen3.8 27B~39 tok/s
- Qwen3.8-27B-OBLITERATED~39 tok/s
- Gemma 4 26B A4B~184 tok/s
- gpt-oss-20b~208 tok/s
- Muse Glimmer~63 tok/s
- Qwen3 14B~78 tok/s
Frequently asked
Quick answers
Can the NVIDIA RTX 4090 run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?
Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning fits the RTX 4090's 24 GB at Q4_K_M (about 11.8 GB needed), running at an estimated 63 tok/s. There's room for up to Q8_0 if you want higher quality.
How much VRAM does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning need?
About 10 GB of weights at Q4_K_M, 19 GB at Q8_0 and 36 GB at FP16. Add roughly 1.8 GB for the KV cache and runtime at modest context lengths.
How fast is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on the RTX 4090?
Roughly 63 tokens per second at Q4_K_M (single user, llama.cpp-style decode). This is an estimate from the RTX 4090's 1008 GB/s memory bandwidth.