Best GPU for Local AI OCR

Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated July 21, 2026

Ranked for OCR and document scanning: Turning scanned pages, screenshots and photographed documents into accurate text.

Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

24 GB VRAM at 960 GB/s. It runs 20 of the models that qualify for this workload; the strongest is Gemma 4 27B ⭐ at an estimated 38.3 tokens/sec.

The picks

	GPU	VRAM	MSRP	Models that fit	Best model it runs	Est. speed
Best overall	AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX	24 GB	$999	20	Gemma 4 27B ⭐	~38.3 tok/s
Best value	Intel Arc B570	10 GB	$219	11	Qwen 3.5 14B	~29.1 tok/s
Budget pick	Intel Arc B570	10 GB	$219	11	Qwen 3.5 14B	~29.1 tok/s
Most memory	NVIDIA DGX Spark	128 GB	$4,699	25	Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct	~4.4 tok/s

GPU	Score	VRAM	MSRP	Models fit	Est. speed	Tok/s per watt	Cost per model
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX	79.3	24 GB	$999	20	~38.3	0.11	$50
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090	78.6	24 GB	$1,599	20	~40.1	0.09	$80
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090	77.6	32 GB	$1,999	20	~66.6	0.12	$100
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090	76.9	24 GB	$1,499	20	~37.4	0.11	$75
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT	74.8	20 GB	$899	16	~32.4	0.1	$56
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti	73.7	16 GB	$749	13	~40.9	0.14	$58
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080	71.7	16 GB	$999	13	~43.5	0.12	$77
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT	70	16 GB	$599	13	~33.3	0.15	$46
Intel Arc B580	69.8	12 GB	$249	12	~34.5	0.18	$21
Intel Arc B570	68.1	10 GB	$219	11	~29.1	0.19	$20
AMD Radeon RX 9070	67.6	16 GB	$549	13	~30	0.14	$42
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT	67.4	16 GB	$499	13	~29.3	0.11	$38

GPUs are scored on four axes: capability (45%), speed (30%), value (20%) and efficiency (5%), each normalised across the whole ranking.
Capability means the intrinsic strength of the best model the card can hold — not how many models fit, and not how fast it streams a small one.
Speed is capped at 40 tok/s: past that, more throughput does not change how the model feels to use.
Apple Silicon is excluded from this ranking. Those entries price a whole computer and rate a chip's package power, so on price-per-capability and performance-per-watt they would beat every add-in card by construction. Apple hardware is covered on the macOS platform page instead.
Shares the vision hard gate but weights structured-output ability higher (25% coding) and latency higher than general vision, because OCR is typically run in batch over many pages where throughput compounds.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX — 24 GB of VRAM runs 20 qualifying models, the strongest being Gemma 4 (Legacy Listing — Unverified).

The Intel Arc B570 at $219, which runs 11 qualifying models.

8 GB is the entry point at which a model for this workload will run at all. More memory buys a stronger model, not just a faster one.