llamaperf

NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB vs NVIDIA RTX 3090 for local LLMs

3 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB and 190 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090

Which is faster for local LLMs?

Nobody has reported the same model at the same quant on both cards yet, so there's no measured head-to-head. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 5.6x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 (168 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB, 936 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.

NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB
Memory
6GB
Memory bandwidth
168 GB/s
FP16 compute
18 TFLOPS
Reports
3
NVIDIA RTX 3090
Memory
24GB
Memory bandwidth
936 GB/s
FP16 compute
142 TFLOPS
Reports
190

Estimated by the calculator

The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape.

ModelNVIDIA RTX 3050 6GBNVIDIA RTX 3090
Qwen3.8 27B1.3 t/sQ6_K, layers on CPU33.9 t/sQ4_K_M
Qwen3.8 125B · 6B activedoesn't fit at these settings19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM
DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active12.6 t/sQ5_K_M, experts in RAM120.1 t/sQ4_K_S
Qwen3.6 27B1.3 t/sQ6_K, layers on CPU33.9 t/sQ4_K_M
Gemma 4 26B · 4B active13.0 t/sQ4_K_S, experts in RAM76.4 t/sQ5_K_S

Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB · NVIDIA RTX 3090

Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB · NVIDIA RTX 3090

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