Can I run Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct on a Mac with 24 GB?

Yes, with a GGUF version

The published weights are too big, but the Q8_0 file from Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF (8.71 GB) fits, with room for ≈ 48K tokens of context.

Full analysis of Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct Everything that runs on Mac with 24 GB Get the Q8_0 file on Hugging Face

ollama run hf.co/Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF:Q8_0

Files and context on Mac with 24 GB

Each file of Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct (and of GGUF versions the site has analyzed), and how much context fits next to it, with the context cache in 16-bit or 8-bit.

File	Size	On Mac with 24 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	17.5 GB	Doesn't fit	—	—
F16Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF	16.4 GB	Doesn't fit	—	—
Q8_0Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF	8.71 GB	Fits	48K	97K
Q4_K_MQwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF	5.03 GB	Fits	73K	145K

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct on other hardware

Popular models that run on Mac with 24 GB

Assumes 67% of the Mac's memory is usable (macOS's default limit for the GPU; it can be raised) and at least 4K tokens of context for one conversation, with the context cache in 16-bit unless noted. Fits leaves at least 20% of that memory for context; Tight leaves less.