Qwen 3 VL 8B

Overview

The dense 8B entry in Qwen 3 VL, offering strong OCR and document analysis with a remarkable 256k multimodal context for its size.

When to pick this model

• On-device or edge multimodal inference
• OCR and structured document extraction
• Long-context multimodal tasks on modest GPUs
• Quick prototyping of VLM-powered features

VRAM requirements by quantization

Quantization	VRAM required
Q4_K_M (recommended)	6 GB
Q5_K_M	7 GB
Q8_0	10 GB
FP16 (no quantization)	16 GB

VRAM figures include model weights plus a typical 8k KV cache and ~600 MB runtime overhead (Ollama / llama.cpp baseline). Add headroom for higher context lengths.

Strengths

• Around 6 GB VRAM at Q4 — runs almost anywhere
• 262k multimodal context in an 8B model
• Solid OCR and document analysis
• Apache 2.0

Limitations

• Trails the 30B variant on complex scene reasoning
• Limited capacity for advanced visual reasoning

Architecture & training

Architecture: Dense vision · 8B · Qwen3-VL · 262k context

Training: Qwen3-VL 8B — accessible version of the Qwen3 vision family.

Quick start

ollama run qwen3-vl:8b

Or use the open-source MCP server to query this model from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.