NVIDIA RTX 5090 vs AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Which graphics card is better for running local language models? Here is how the NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB) compares against the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24 GB) in real memory headroom, supported model architectures, and generation speed.
NVIDIA · Blackwell
32 GB VRAM
NVIDIA RTX 5090
- Memory Bandwidth: 1792 GB/s (GDDR7 512-bit)
- Fits fully in VRAM: 37 popular models
- Power Draw (TDP): 575W
- Largest recommended (Q4): 49B–70B
AMD · RDNA 3
24 GB VRAM
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
- Memory Bandwidth: 960 GB/s (GDDR6 384-bit)
- Fits fully in VRAM: 36 popular models
- Power Draw (TDP): 355W
- Largest recommended (Q4): 32B–34B
The AI Local Check Verdict: Which GPU should you buy for AI?
The NVIDIA RTX 5090 is the clear winner for local AI. It provides both 8 GB more VRAM and higher memory bandwidth (1792 GB/s vs 960 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 5090, but NOT on AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
These models run entirely in GPU VRAM on the NVIDIA RTX 5090, but require slow system RAM offload on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX:
| Model | Size | Downloads | NVIDIA RTX 5090 | AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MaziyarPanahi/Mixtral-8x22B-v0.1-GGUF | 140.62B | 161,087 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
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