// Qwen · Vision-language
Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct: VRAM & local deployment
2.21B parameters. About 2.2 GB at 4-bit and 5.6 GB at BF16 with one 8K-token request.
released 2024-08-28licence: Commercial OKmemory figures are estimates
01Specs
| Publisher | Alibaba Qwen · Qwen |
|---|---|
| Family / series | Qwen · Qwen2-VL |
| Type | Vision-language (image-text-to-text) |
| Parameters | 2.21B Source: counted from official safetensors weights |
| Context length | 32K tokens (32,768)max_position_embeddings in config.json |
| Architecture | 28 layers · GQA |
| Released weights | BF16 · 4.4 GBdownload |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 · Commercial OKPermissive licence (Apache-2.0 / MIT / CC-BY / OpenMDW): commercial use allowed. |
| Released | 2024-08-28 (Hugging Face repo created) |
02How much VRAM it needs (estimate)
Total = weights + 10% + 0.5GB overhead + KV cache for one request (FP16 KV). More concurrent users multiply the KV column.
| Precision | Weights | Total @ 8K | Total @ 32K | Smallest GPU | Mac |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 / FP16 (original) | 4.4 GB | 5.6 GB | 6.3 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| FP8 / INT8 / Q8_0 | 2.4 GB | 3.3 GB | 4.0 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| 4-bit (Q4_K_M / AWQ / GPTQ-Int4) | 1.3 GB | 2.2 GB | 2.9 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
KV cache per request: 8K 0.2 GB · 32K 0.9 GB
Bits per weight: BF16 16, FP8 8.5, 4-bit 4.85. “Fits” = total ≤ 90% of memory; Mac GPU can use ~2/3 of unified memory (≤36GB) or ~3/4 (larger). For MoE, all experts must be in memory, so size by total parameters. Method →
03How to run it
Only runtimes the publisher or the runtime’s official library names for this model.
- Transformers — mentioned in the official model card
04Official repositories & quantised builds
5 official repo(s) from Qwen.
- Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct Instruct
- Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct-AWQ Instruct/AWQ
- Qwen2-VL-2B main
- Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct-GPTQ-Int4 Instruct/GPTQ/INT4
- Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct-GPTQ-Int8 Instruct/GPTQ/INT8
05Other Qwen models
All 112 →| Model | Params | 4-bit total | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct · same series | 8.29B | 6.5 GB | 2024-08-28 |
| Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct · same series | 73.4B | 52.1 GB | 2024-09-17 |
| Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo | 7.12B | 5.2 GB | 2026-10-09 |
| Qwen-Image-2.1 | 7.12B | 5.2 GB | 2026-09-14 |
| Qwen3.8-Flash-Next | 180B / 6B | 121 GB | 2026-08-24 |
| Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B | 2.4T / 95B | 1.60 TB | 2026-08-08 |
| Qwen3.8-27B | 27.8B | 19.6 GB | 2026-08-05 |
| Qwen3.6-27B | 27.8B | 19.6 GB | 2026-04-21 |
| Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | 36B / 3B | 24.6 GB | 2026-04-15 |
| Qwen3.5-0.8B | 873M | 1.2 GB | 2026-02-28 |
06Sources
Data checked 2025-01-12. Parameters, context and licence are copied from the official repository; memory figures are our estimates.