Calculate the TPS of the GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q on local AI models

NVIDIA 12 GB GDDR6 432 GB/s January 2023

Every model in our catalogue assessed against this card at the context length and minimum quality you choose. Speed is an estimate for a single request, calculated from this card's memory bandwidth and the size of each model once compressed.

Calculated for this card

411 models it can run

721 models in our catalogue altogether

Largest model it holds

ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B

21B · Q3_K_M · 131 tok/s

Fastest model

Gemma 3 QAT 1B

183 tok/s · 1B

Which AI models can run on a GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q?

Set the inputs, read the answer

More context means more memory for the conversation cache. Speed is for a fresh conversation and does not change with this setting.

Hides models that would only fit by being compressed below this point.

411 models match

Calculating
Quantisation Fit
183 tok/s

156–220

Gemma 3 1B 1B Mar 2025 1.8 GB 33k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
183 tok/s

156–220

Gemma 3 QAT 1B 1B Apr 2025 1.8 GB 33k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
183 tok/s

110–293 · low confidence

HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B Nov 2023 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
183 tok/s

110–293 · low confidence

LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B Dec 2024 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
183 tok/s

110–293 · low confidence

OLMo-1B 1B Feb 2024 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
183 tok/s

110–293 · low confidence

Pythia-1b 1B Apr 2023 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
169 tok/s

102–271 · low confidence

OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B May 2024 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
166 tok/s

100–266 · low confidence

DeciCoder-1B 1.1B Aug 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
166 tok/s

100–266 · low confidence

SantaCoder 1.1B Jan 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
166 tok/s

100–266 · low confidence

TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B Oct 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
166 tok/s

100–266 · low confidence

TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B Oct 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
152 tok/s

91–244 · low confidence

EXAONE 4.0 (1.2B) 1.2B Jul 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
152 tok/s

91–244 · low confidence

LFM2-1.2B 1.2B Jul 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
152 tok/s

91–244 · low confidence

MinerU2.5 1.2B Sep 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
152 tok/s

91–244 · low confidence

Pleias 1.0 1.2B 1.2B Dec 2024 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
152 tok/s

91–244 · low confidence

Pleias-RAG-1B 1.2B Apr 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
149 tok/s

126–179

Llama 3.2 1B 1.2B Sep 2024 2.2 GB 131k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
147 tok/s

88–235 · low confidence

DeepSeekMoE-16B 16B Jan 2024 10.0 GB 4k tokens Q4_K_M Tight
147 tok/s

88–235 · low confidence

MiniCPM-1.2B 1.2B Jun 2024 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

84–225 · low confidence

DeepSeek Coder 1.3B 1.3B Jan 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

84–225 · low confidence

DeepSeek-VL-1.3B 1.3B Mar 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

84–225 · low confidence

DigiRL 1.3B Jun 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

84–225 · low confidence

GLA Transformer 1.3B 1.3B Aug 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

84–225 · low confidence

Janus 1.3B 1.3B Oct 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

84–225 · low confidence

Kosmos-2.5 1.3B Aug 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable

Speeds are estimates for a single request — one conversation at a time — calculated from memory bandwidth, model size and quantisation. Real throughput varies with the inference runtime and its version. Figures published by hardware vendors measure many simultaneous requests and are much higher.

On record

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q full specification

Everything on record for this board, ordered by how much it bears on running a language model rather than by how a spec sheet would list it. Memory comes first because it decides the outcome; the rest is context.

Memory

The two specifications that decide what this card can run and how quickly. Capacity sets which models fit; bandwidth sets how many tokens per second they produce once they do.

Memory size
12 GB
Memory bandwidth
432 GB/s
Memory type
GDDR6
Memory bus width
192 bit
Memory clock
2.25 GHz

The chip

Which processor is on the board and how it was manufactured. A smaller process size generally means more performance for the same power.

Graphics processor
AD104
Architecture
Ada Lovelace
Generation
GeForce 40 Mobile
Foundry
TSMC
Process size
5 nm
Transistors
35.8 billion
Transistor density
121,800 K/mm²
Die size
294 mm²
Released
3 January 2023

Clock speeds

How fast the processor runs. Worth far less here than on a gaming benchmark: generating text is limited by memory bandwidth, so a higher clock barely moves the result.

Base clock
795 MHz
Boost clock
1.35 GHz

Processing units

What the chip contains. These drive graphics performance and matter mainly for processing a long prompt rather than for producing the answer.

Shading units
7,424
Texture mapping units
232
Render output units
80
Streaming multiprocessors
58
Tensor cores
232
Ray tracing cores
58
L1 cache
128 KB
L2 cache
48 MB

Theoretical performance

Peak arithmetic rates published for the board. These are ceilings that no real workload reaches, and generating text reaches a small fraction of them because it is limited by memory rather than arithmetic.

Half precision (FP16)
20 TFLOPS
Single precision (FP32)
20 TFLOPS
Double precision (FP64)
313.2 GFLOPS
Pixel rate
108 GPixel/s
Texture rate
313 GTexel/s

The board

What it takes to physically install and power the card — the practical constraints that decide whether it fits the machine you already own.

Power draw (TDP)
60 W
Power connectors
None
Bus interface
PCIe 4.0 x16
Slot width
IGP

Software support

Which graphics and compute interfaces the card supports. CUDA compute capability is the one that bears on inference: below 7.0 there are no tensor cores, and modern inference software falls back to slower code paths.

CUDA compute capability
8.9
DirectX
12.2
OpenGL
4.6
Vulkan
1.4
OpenCL
3.0
Shader model
6.8

Listings

Where to buy a GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q

No vendor is currently listing this card. Listings come from vendors who publish them here directly — browse the vendor directory to see who is selling what.

What the numbers mean

Capacity and bandwidth

Memory

12 GB

Bandwidth

432 GB/s

Largest model

ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q carries 12 GB of GDDR6. That reaches comfortably into small and mid-sized models, though the largest stay out of reach without splitting them. Driver overhead leaves roughly 10.8 GB.

Memory bandwidth reaches 432 GB/s across a bus of 192 bits. That is the number governing generation speed — arithmetic per byte read is small enough that the bus, not the cores, is what everything waits on.

That comes from a memory clock of 2.25 GHz. Widening the bus and raising the clock are the two levers a manufacturer has, which is why a card with unremarkable cores can still generate quickly.

The biggest thing it holds is ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B, 21B, compressed to Q3_K_M and generating around 131 tokens per second.

The chip and how it was built

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q is built on the graphics processor AD104, using the architecture Ada Lovelace from NVIDIA, as part of the generation GeForce 40 Mobile.

The chip is manufactured by TSMC, on a process of 5 nm, with a die measuring 294 mm², holding 35.8 billion transistors. A smaller process generally means more performance for the same power, though for language models it matters far less than the memory subsystem.

It was released in January 2023, roughly 3.6951594385429 years ago. Inference software support tends to follow hardware by a year or two, so a card of this age generally has mature, well-optimised code paths available to it.

Compute throughput, and why it matters less than it looks

FP16

20 TFLOPS

FP64

313.2 GFLOPS

Tensor cores

232

On paper GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q reaches 20 TFLOPS at half precision, and 20 TFLOPS at single precision. These are peak figures no real workload sustains, and generating text reaches only a small fraction of them — decoding is limited by memory rather than arithmetic, which is why a card can look enormously powerful here and still produce tokens at an ordinary rate.

Double-precision throughput reaches 313.2 GFLOPS. It has no bearing on running a language model — no inference runtime uses it — but it separates datacentre parts from consumer ones, since the latter deliberately restrict it.

The card carries 232 tensor cores across 58 streaming multiprocessors. These accelerate the matrix arithmetic at the heart of a transformer, and they are what make prompt processing — reading a long document before answering — dramatically faster than it would otherwise be.

Clocks run from a base of 795 MHz to a boost of 1.35 GHz. Worth far less here than on a gaming benchmark: raising the clock speeds up the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not what generation is waiting on.

Cache and processing units

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q has an L1 cache of 128 KB, backed by an L2 cache of 48 MB. Cache absorbs a share of the memory traffic that would otherwise hit the main bus, which is the one place on this page where a number other than bandwidth quietly affects generation speed — a large L2 lets more of the working set stay close to the cores.

There are 7,424 shading units, 232 texture mapping units, and 80 render output units. These drive graphics workloads and contribute to prompt processing, but they sit idle for much of the time a model spends generating a reply.

Power, size and installation

Power draw

60 W

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q is rated at 60 W. Running a language model keeps a card busy in bursts rather than continuously — it draws hard while generating and idles between requests — so sustained draw over a working day is usually well below the rated figure.

The board occupies igp. Worth checking against the case and power supply already in the machine, since the largest cards need considerably more of both than a typical desktop provides.

It connects over PCIe 4.0 x16. The interface governs how quickly a model is loaded from disk into the card, not how fast it runs once there, so a narrower link costs a few seconds at startup and nothing thereafter.

The extremes

The largest AI models that run on a GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q

The biggest open-weight models that fit on this card, newest first. Each is shown at the best compression the card can hold.

  1. 01 ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B 21B · Q3_K_M · Jun 2025 131 tok/s
  2. 02 GigaChat Lite (GigaChat-20B-A3B) 20B · Q3_K_M · Dec 2024 137 tok/s
  3. 03 InternLM2.5 20B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2024 24.7 tok/s
  4. 04 Granite 20B 20B · Q3_K_M · May 2024 24.7 tok/s
  5. 05 InternLM2-20B 20B · Q3_K_M · Jan 2024 24.7 tok/s
  6. 06 CogAgent 18B · IQ4_XS · Dec 2023 25.0 tok/s
  7. 07 SPHINX (Llama 2 13B) 19.9B · Q3_K_M · Nov 2023 24.8 tok/s
  8. 08 CogVLM-17B 17B · IQ4_XS · Nov 2023 26.4 tok/s
  9. 09 Flan UL2 19.5B · Q3_K_M · Mar 2023 25.3 tok/s
  10. 10 Palmyra Large 20B 20B · Q3_K_M · Mar 2023 24.7 tok/s

The fastest AI models on a GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q

Where this card produces tokens quickest. Smaller models dominate here, because generating each token means reading the whole model out of memory once.

  1. 01 Gemma 3 QAT 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 183 tok/s
  2. 02 Gemma 3 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 183 tok/s
  3. 03 LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 183 tok/s
  4. 04 OLMo-1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 183 tok/s
  5. 05 HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 183 tok/s
  6. 06 Pythia-1b 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 183 tok/s
  7. 07 OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 169 tok/s
  8. 08 TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 166 tok/s
  9. 09 TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 166 tok/s
  10. 10 DeciCoder-1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 166 tok/s

Step by step

How to work out the tokens per second of a GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q

You do not have to calculate anything by hand — the gputps.com calculator on this page has already worked it out for every model this card can hold. Reading off the answer takes six steps.

  1. 01

    Search for the model you want

    The table lists 411 models this card runs. Search narrows the list by name or by size.

  2. 02

    Set the context length you will actually use

    Longer conversations cost memory on top of the weights. Against 12 GB that is frequently the difference between a model fitting and not.

  3. 03

    Set a minimum quality if you need one

    Each model is shown at the best compression this card can hold. A minimum quality hides the ones that only fit by being squeezed further than you would accept.

  4. 04

    Take the range as the answer

    The figures are calculated, not measured. The fastest result on this card is 183 tok/s on Gemma 3 QAT 1B. The same card and model vary by thirty to fifty per cent between inference runtimes.

  5. 05

    Read the fit verdict last

    The fit column separates models that just fit from those with room to spare — worth checking before settling on one, against an available 12 GB.

  6. 06

    Cross-check against other hardware

    Every model name in the table links to its own page, which runs the same calculation across every card we hold. That is where you see whether the right buy is GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q.

Answers

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q — common questions

01

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— how much cache does it have?

The L1 cache is 128 KB, and the L2 cache is 48 MB. Cache absorbs part of the memory traffic that would otherwise reach the main bus, so a larger L2 gives a modest lift to generation speed beyond what bandwidth alone predicts.

02

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— what are its TFLOPS?

It is rated at 20 TFLOPS at half precision and 20 TFLOPS at single precision. These are peak arithmetic ceilings rather than achievable rates, and text generation reaches only a small fraction of them because it is limited by memory bandwidth instead.

03

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— how many tensor cores does it have?

It has 232 tensor cores across 58 streaming multiprocessors. They accelerate the matrix arithmetic a transformer is built from, which mainly speeds up processing a long prompt rather than producing the reply.

04

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— does it support CUDA?

Yes. It reports CUDA compute capability 8.9. Capability 7.0 and above has tensor cores, which modern inference software uses; below that it falls back to slower code paths for quantised models.

05

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— what bus interface does it use?

It uses PCIe 4.0 x16. This governs how fast a model is loaded onto the card rather than how fast it runs once loaded, so it costs a few seconds at startup and nothing during generation.

06

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— is it good for running local AI models?

Its memory covers small and mid-sized models, though the largest are out of reach and its bandwidth gives usable, if unspectacular, generation speeds. In total it runs 411 of the models we track. Whether that is enough depends entirely on which model you want — the table above answers that directly.

07

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— can it run a model that does not fit in its memory?

It can be split, with the overflow held in system memory beyond the card's 12 GB drags the whole thing down, and none of the figures on this page assume it.

08

Would two GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q cards be twice as fast?

Pairing them buys headroom rather than pace: 24 GB which lets you hold models neither could hold alone, but generation does not split that way. These figures describe one card.

09

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— which AI models can it run?

411 of the 721 open-weight language models we track fit on this card and can be run locally. The table on this page lists every one, with the memory it needs, the quantisation it runs at and an estimated generation speed.

10

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— what is the largest AI model it can run?

The largest model in our catalogue that fits is ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B at 21B parameters, compressed to Q3_K_M. It generates roughly 131 tokens per second and needs about 10.1 GB of the card's memory.

11

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— how many tokens per second does it produce?

It depends on the model. The fastest model we track here is Gemma 3 QAT 1B at about 183 tokens per second, while larger models run proportionally slower because each token requires reading the whole model out of memory once. Speeds are estimates for a single conversation at a time.

12

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— can it run 7B models?

Yes. For example it runs Gemma 4 E4B at Q8_0, using about 9.8 GB of memory and generating around 40.7 tokens per second.

13

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— can it run 13B models?

Yes. For example it runs DeepSeekMoE-16B at Q4_K_M, using about 10.0 GB of memory and generating around 147 tokens per second.

14

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— how much memory does it have?

This card has 12 GB of GDDR6. Around a tenth is reserved by the inference runtime and the driver, leaving roughly 10.8 GB available for a model and its conversation.

15

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— what is its memory bandwidth?

Memory bandwidth reaches 432 GB/s across a bus of 192 bits. This is the single best predictor of how fast it generates text, because producing each token means reading the entire model out of memory once.

16

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— what type of memory does it use?

It uses GDDR6 clocked at 2.25 GHz. HBM types are found on datacentre accelerators and carry far more bandwidth than the GDDR used on desktop cards, which is why they generate tokens considerably faster at the same capacity.

17

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— who makes it?

This is a product of NVIDIA, with the chip manufactured by TSMC, on a process of 5 nm.

18

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— when was it released?

It was released in January 2023.

19

GeForce RTX 4080 Max-Q— how much power does it use?

Rated board power is 60 W. Generating text draws hard in bursts and idles between requests, so average consumption over a working session is normally well below the rated figure.

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

This page starts from the hardware. If you already know which model you want and need to know what it takes to run it, start from the model instead.

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