Which needs more VRAM, Mistral 7B or Mistral Nemo 12B?

Mistral Nemo 12B needs 9.5 GB at Q4_K_M vs Mistral 7B's 9 GB at Q8_0. Mistral 7B is more memory-efficient.

Can I run Mistral 7B and Mistral Nemo 12B on the same GPU?

Mistral 7B requires 5.7–16 GB and Mistral Nemo 12B requires 9.5–28 GB depending on quantization. You can run them sequentially on the same hardware — Ollama handles model swapping automatically.

Mistral 7B vs Mistral Nemo 12B

Comparing VRAM requirements, performance, and capabilities for running these models locally with Ollama.

Mistral 7B

Parameters

Context

32K

VRAM Range

5.7–16 GB

Recommended

Q8_0 (9 GB)

ByMistral AI·LicenseApache 2.0

Mistral Nemo 12B

Parameters

12B

Context

128K

VRAM Range

9.5–28 GB

Recommended

Q4_K_M (9.5 GB)

ByMistral AI·LicenseApache 2.0

VRAM Requirements by Quantization

Side-by-side memory needs at each quality level.

Quantization	Mistral 7B	Mistral Nemo 12B	Difference
Q4_K_M	5.7 GB	9.5 GB	-3.8 GB
Q8_0	9 GB	16 GB	-7.0 GB
F16	16 GB	28 GB	-12.0 GB

Capabilities

Feature support comparison.

Capability	Mistral 7B	Mistral Nemo 12B
text generation	Yes	Yes
code generation	Yes	Yes
multilingual	Yes	Yes
summarization	Yes	Yes
reasoning	—	Yes
tool use	—	Yes

Benchmark Scores

Higher is better. Scores from published evaluations.

Benchmark	Mistral 7B	Mistral Nemo 12B
mmlu	62.5	68.0

Hardware Compatibility

Can each model run at recommended quantization on common VRAM tiers?

VRAM	Mistral 7B	Mistral Nemo 12B
8 GB	Offload	Offload
12 GB	Runs	Runs
16 GB	Runs	Runs
24 GB	Runs	Runs
32 GB	Runs	Runs
48 GB	Runs	Runs
64 GB	Runs	Runs
96 GB	Runs	Runs

Run Mistral 7B

ollama run mistral:7b-instruct-q8_0

Run Mistral Nemo 12B

ollama run mistral-nemo:12b-instruct-q4_K_M

Check your exact hardware

Use the compatibility checker to see how each model performs on your specific GPU or Mac.

Mistral 7B details Mistral Nemo 12B details Compatibility Checker

Related Comparisons

Llama 3.1 8B vs Mistral 7B Mistral Nemo 12B vs Gemma 3 12B