NVIDIA vs AMD for Local AI: What the Gap Actually Costs
AMD's hardware is competitive and its software is not — but how much that matters depends entirely on whether you are generating text or images.
Graphics cards evaluated for AI work, where VRAM capacity and memory bandwidth usually matter far more than raw gaming frame rates.
AMD's hardware is competitive and its software is not — but how much that matters depends entirely on whether you are generating text or images.
The gap is not incremental. 32 GB reaches 32B-class models; 16 GB does not — and for image generation the calculation reverses entirely.
Ollama runs on almost anything — the question is which models fit entirely in VRAM. Cards ranked by what they hold, with the offload behaviour that catches everyone out.
Graphics cards ranked by what they can actually run. Memory capacity decides what fits, bandwidth decides how fast — and neither appears in a gaming benchmark.
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