NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop vs NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop
Which graphics card is better for running local language models? Here is how the NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop (12 GB) compares against the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop (8 GB) in real memory headroom, supported model architectures, and generation speed.
NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop
- Memory Bandwidth: 432 GB/s (GDDR6 192-bit)
- Fits fully in VRAM: 34 popular models
- Power Draw (TDP): 150W
- Largest recommended (Q4): 14B
NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop
- Memory Bandwidth: 448 GB/s (GDDR6 256-bit)
- Fits fully in VRAM: 26 popular models
- Power Draw (TDP): 125W
- Largest recommended (Q4): 8B
The AI Local Check Verdict: Which GPU should you buy for AI?
The Classic Headroom vs Speed Trade-off: The NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop has 4 GB more VRAM, allowing it to fit larger models that cannot run locally on the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop.
However, the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop has a higher memory bandwidth (448 GB/s vs 432 GB/s). For models that comfortably fit in 8 GB VRAM, the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop will generate tokens roughly 4.0% faster. Choose the NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop if you prioritize model size flexibility, or the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop if you prioritize token generation speed on models up to 8 GB.
Models that fit on NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop, but NOT on NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop
These models run entirely in GPU VRAM on the NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop, but require slow system RAM offload on the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop:
| Model | Size | Downloads | NVIDIA RTX 4080 Laptop | NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti / 3070 Laptop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bartowski/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-GGUF | 32.76B | 868,558 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF | 20.91B | 579,462 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF | 30.53B | 471,274 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| Qwen/Qwen3-14B-GGUF | 14.77B | 353,321 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| bartowski/Kwaipilot_KAT-Coder-V2.5-Dev-GGUF | 34.66B | 285,365 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/GLM-4.7-Flash-GGUF | 31.22B | 248,346 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/flint-GGUF | 39.79B | 239,139 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B-GGUF | 34.66B | 221,200 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |