Can I run distilgpt2 on an RTX 3060 12 GB?

Yes

Its published weights (353 MB) fit in the 10.8 GB an RTX 3060 12 GB can use, with room for ≈ 1K tokens of context.

Full analysis of distilgpt2 Everything that runs on RTX 3060 12 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download distilbert/distilgpt2

Files and context on RTX 3060 12 GB

Each file of distilgpt2 (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 RTX 3060 12 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	353 MB	Fits	1K	1K
4-bit (estimate)	49.6 MB	Fits	1K	1K

distilgpt2 on other hardware

NVIDIA H100Yes
RTX 5090Yes
RTX 4090Yes
RTX 3090Yes
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBYes
RTX 3060 12 GBYes
RTX 4060Yes
Mac with 32 GBYes
Mac with 64 GBYes
Mac with 128 GBYes

Popular models that run on RTX 3060 12 GB

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tiny-Qwen2ForCausalLM-2.5trl-internal-testing · 2.44M
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUFunsloth · 30.5B
Qwen2.5-0.5B-InstructQwen · 494M
Qwen2.5-1.5B-InstructQwen · 1.54B
Qwen3-4BQwen · 4.02B
Qwen3.5-4BQwen · 4.66B

Assumes 90% of the card's memory is usable 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.