The most downloaded AI models that fit on your GPU

Most "best models for your GPU" lists are somebody's opinion. This one is two measurements: how many people downloaded a model from Hugging Face in the last 30 days, and whether a real file of it fits in your card's memory with room left for a conversation.

Bar chart: the five most downloaded AI models that fit on an RTX 5090, 4090, 3090 and 5080, with downloads in the last 30 days.
The five most downloaded models that fit each card, September 2026. The tables below are generated from the site's current data, so they stay right as models come and go.

The first thing the chart shows is that the popular models fit almost anything. Qwen3-0.6B, Qwen3-VL-8B and Qwen3-8B are near the top for the 5090, the 4090 and the 3090 alike, because downloads are dominated by small models that people fine-tune, embed in apps and run on laptops.

The second thing is where the cards actually differ: the file. Qwen3-Coder-30B is on every list, but a 5090 runs it at UD-Q6_K_XL, a 4090 at Q5_K_S and a 5080 at UD-IQ3_XXS. Same model, three levels of compression — see what bits per weight means below.

RTX 5090 — 32 GB

203 models the site has analyzed fit on an RTX 5090 with at least 8K tokens of context; the 10 most downloaded are shown. See them all in the hardware calculator.

RTX 4090 — 24 GB

200 models the site has analyzed fit on an RTX 4090 with at least 8K tokens of context; the 10 most downloaded are shown. See them all in the hardware calculator.

RTX 3090 — 24 GB

The 3090 holds exactly what the 4090 holds: the same 24 GB, so the same files fit. It generates more slowly, because its memory is slower, but nothing here changes.

200 models the site has analyzed fit on an RTX 3090 with at least 8K tokens of context; the 10 most downloaded are shown. See them all in the hardware calculator.

RTX 5080 — 16 GB

137 models the site has analyzed fit on an RTX 5080 with at least 8K tokens of context; the 10 most downloaded are shown. See them all in the hardware calculator.

What "fits" means

A model fits when a real file of it — the published weights, or a GGUF version somebody made — leaves room for at least 8K tokens of context in the tables above, using about 90% of the card's memory. The rest goes to the driver and the program running the model.

Two things the tables deliberately don't do. They don't count files that would only fit as a hypothetical 4-bit conversion nobody has published, so everything listed is something you can download today. And "best" means popular and fits, not good: the site measures what a model needs, never how well it answers.

Each model name opens its page, where you can see where its parameters live, what it needs at a datacentre, and the exact command to download it.