GPU HEAD-TO-HEAD

NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti vs NVIDIA RTX 3080

Which graphics card is better for running local language models? Here is how the NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB) compares against the NVIDIA RTX 3080 (10 GB) in real memory headroom, supported model architectures, and generation speed.

NVIDIA · Blackwell 16 GB VRAM

NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti

  • Memory Bandwidth: 896 GB/s (GDDR7 256-bit)
  • Fits fully in VRAM: 34 popular models
  • Power Draw (TDP): 300W
  • Largest recommended (Q4): 20B–22B
View all NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti models →
NVIDIA · Ampere 10 GB VRAM

NVIDIA RTX 3080

  • Memory Bandwidth: 760 GB/s (GDDR6X 320-bit)
  • Fits fully in VRAM: 29 popular models
  • Power Draw (TDP): 320W
  • Largest recommended (Q4): 8B
View all NVIDIA RTX 3080 models →

The AI Local Check Verdict: Which GPU should you buy for AI?

The NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti is the clear winner for local AI. It provides both 6 GB more VRAM and higher memory bandwidth (896 GB/s vs 760 GB/s).

This allows it to run larger model architectures entirely in video memory while also delivering faster token generation speeds on models of all sizes.

Models that fit on NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti, but NOT on NVIDIA RTX 3080

These models run entirely in GPU VRAM on the NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti, but require slow system RAM offload on the NVIDIA RTX 3080:

Model Size Downloads NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti NVIDIA RTX 3080
unsloth/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF 20.91B 501,909 Fits in VRAM Offload (Slow)
unsloth/Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B-GGUF 34.66B 373,970 Fits in VRAM Offload (Slow)
MaziyarPanahi/Qwen3-30B-A3B-GGUF 30.53B 260,445 Fits in VRAM Offload (Slow)
MaziyarPanahi/Qwen3-32B-GGUF 32.76B 259,844 Fits in VRAM Offload (Slow)
bartowski/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-GGUF 32.76B 216,296 Fits in VRAM Offload (Slow)

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