Is medgemma-4b-it or Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct is smaller at Q4_K_M: 1.03 GiB against 2.32 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

medgemma-4b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

medgemma-4b-it vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct is the smaller download — 1,107,409,952 bytes against 2,489,893,664. At long context the gap widens: medgemma-4b-it's KV cache at 32K is 4.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	medgemma-4b-it	Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
Parameters	4.3B	2.1B
Architecture	gemma3	qwen3vl
Layers	34	28
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	46	46
Smallest quantization	1.10 GiB	0.50 GiB
Q4_K_M	2.32 GiB	1.03 GiB
Licence	other	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	medgemma-4b-it	Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.44 GiB	1.76×
8,192	0.33 GiB	0.88 GiB	2.68×
16,384	0.48 GiB	1.75 GiB	3.63×
32,768	0.79 GiB	3.50 GiB	4.40×
65,536	1.42 GiB	7.00 GiB	4.93×
131,072	2.67 GiB	14.00 GiB	5.24×