Is Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct or gemma-4-12B-it smaller?

Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.36 GiB against 6.63 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct vs gemma-4-12B-it

At Q4_K_M, Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct is the smaller download — 4,683,072,416 bytes against 7,121,861,440. At long context the gap widens: Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 1.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct	gemma-4-12B-it
Parameters	8.3B	12.0B
Architecture	qwen2vl	gemma4
Layers	28	48
Native context	32,768	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	28	59
Smallest quantization	2.59 GiB	3.92 GiB
Q4_K_M	4.36 GiB	6.63 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct	gemma-4-12B-it	Ratio
4,096	0.22 GiB	0.72 GiB	3.29×
8,192	0.44 GiB	0.97 GiB	2.21×
16,384	0.88 GiB	1.47 GiB	1.68×
32,768	1.75 GiB	2.47 GiB	1.41×
65,536	3.50 GiB	4.47 GiB	1.28×
131,072	7.00 GiB	8.47 GiB	1.21×