Is gemma-4-31B-Mergemaxxed or Qwen3.8-27B smaller?

Qwen3.8-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.66 GiB against 17.40 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.8-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-31B-Mergemaxxed vs Qwen3.8-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.8-27B is the smaller download — 16,810,714,336 bytes against 18,687,062,976. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.8-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-31B-Mergemaxxed	Qwen3.8-27B
Parameters	31.3B	27.8B
Architecture	gemma4	qwen35
Layers	60	64
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	37	22
Smallest quantization	6.67 GiB	8.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	17.40 GiB	15.66 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-31B-Mergemaxxed	Qwen3.8-27B	Ratio
4,096	1.80 GiB	0.25 GiB	7.18×
8,192	2.42 GiB	0.50 GiB	4.84×
16,384	3.67 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.67×
32,768	6.17 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.09×
65,536	11.17 GiB	4.00 GiB	2.79×
131,072	21.17 GiB	8.00 GiB	2.65×