Comparison
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 for local LLMs
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB usable, 936.2 GB/s) vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (12GB usable, 504.2 GB/s) for local LLMs: capacity decides which models load at all, memory bandwidth decides the speed tier. Verdicts below are computed per model at each machine's best clean quant.
| Spec | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 |
|---|---|---|
| Type | NVIDIA GPU | NVIDIA GPU |
| Memory for models | 24 GB VRAM | 12 GB VRAM |
| Memory bandwidth | 936.2 GB/s | 504.2 GB/s |
| Price | $1,499 MSRP | $599 MSRP |
| TDP | 350 W | 200 W |
| Backends | CUDA · Vulkan | CUDA · Vulkan |
| Gaming (estimate) | 1440p-class | 1440p-class |
Specs as of 2026-07-08 — sources on each product page. Gaming tier is estimated from FP32 compute, not a game benchmark.
What each can run, head to head
The 12 most-downloaded models we track, each graded at that machine's best clean-fit quant (llama.cpp, 8K context). Click a verdict for the full breakdown.
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Verdicts computed from published specs and measured GGUF sizes — how the math works.