NVIDIA RTX 3090 vs NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB for local LLMs
217 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 and 4 on the NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB
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 4.9x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 (936 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 3090, 192 on the NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
NVIDIA RTX 3090
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 936 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 142 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 217
NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB
- Memory
- 6GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 192 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 46 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 4
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.
| Model | NVIDIA RTX 3090 | NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M | 1.3 t/sQ6_K, layers on CPU |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 120.1 t/sQ4_K_S | 13.2 t/sQ5_K_M, experts in RAM |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M | 1.3 t/sQ6_K, layers on CPU |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 76.4 t/sQ5_K_S | 13.6 t/sQ4_K_S, experts in RAM |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 3090 · NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 3090 · NVIDIA RTX 4050 6GB