Cosmos 3 Nano — VRAM, Speed & Local Setup

Autor: Jakub Rusinowski · Ostatnia aktualizacja: 21 lipca 2026

Model libraryCosmos 3 → Cosmos 3 Nano

The mid-tier workhorse — a 16B-parameter two-tower MoT on a dense 8B backbone, tuned for high-quality video and action reasoning in a fraction of a second. Nano is the balance point: much cheaper to serve than Super while still leading open models (NVIDIA reports it matches the second-best result on R-Bench). Weights are ~32 GB at BF16, but NVIDIA recommends an RTX PRO 6000 / 96 GB-class GPU for full-context BF16 inference because video generation activations are memory-hungry. Omnimodal I/O (text, image, video, audio, action). OpenMDW-1.1. Specs from launch coverage and the Hugging Face model card — verify before relying on them.

Cosmos 3 Nano needs about 10 GB of VRAM at BF16 — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. On Apple Silicon that figure comes out of unified memory.

Specifications

Parameters16B total (8B dense transformer backbone)
Context windowOmnimodal I/O (video/action)
ArchitectureTwo-tower Mixture-of-Transformers — autoregressive reasoner (VLM) + diffusion generator, shared multimodal attention
ProviderNVIDIA
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1
Specified atBF16
System RAM96 GB
Record updated2026-07-21

Licence

OpenMDW-1.1commercial use permitted. Commercial use permitted. No usage restrictions beyond attribution.

VRAM and Speed by Quantization

Modelled on a reference NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB), with no KV cache (this record has no published architecture). Speed figures are ESTIMATES from the memory-bandwidth roofline described on the methodology page, not benchmarks we ran — rows marked measured come from published or reader-submitted runs. VRAM here includes the KV cache, so it reads higher than the headline figure above, which does not.

QuantWeightsVRAM neededEst. speedFit on 24 GB
Q2_K5.3 GB6.1 GB~150 tok/s (est.)Fits comfortably
Q3_K_M6.8 GB7.6 GB~130 tok/s (est.)Fits comfortably
Q4_K_M9.7 GB10.5 GB~104 tok/s (est.)Fits comfortably
Q5_K_M11.3 GB12.1 GB~93 tok/s (est.)Fits comfortably
Q6_K13.1 GB13.9 GB~84 tok/s (est.)Fits comfortably
Q8_017.0 GB17.8 GB~69 tok/s (est.)Fits comfortably
F1632.0 GB32.8 GB~6 tok/s (est.)Offloads to system RAM (slow)

Want the memory numbers alone, at every quantization level and your own context length? Use the Cosmos 3 Nano VRAM calculator.

Buy This HardwareIntel Arc B580 12GB — 12 GB VRAM · 190 W board powerDeploy in the Cloud NowRTX 4090 on RunPod — from $0.34/hr · rate checked 2026-07

or compare on Vast.ai from $0.35/hr (typical low · varies)

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Cloud GPU links are referral links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Recommended GPU

The cheapest catalogued GPU that runs Cosmos 3 Nano is the Intel Arc B570 (10 GB).

Ujawnienie afiliacyjne: Niektóre odnośniki na tej stronie to linki afiliacyjne — jeśli dokonasz zakupu za ich pośrednictwem, LLM Configurator może otrzymać prowizję bez dodatkowych kosztów dla Ciebie. Jako uczestnik programu Amazon Associates, LLM Configurator zarabia na kwalifikujących się zakupach.
Intel Arc B570 10GB
10 GB VRAM · 150 W board power
Ceny w 2026 są niestabilne — sprawdź aktualną ofertę.
Sprawdź cenę na Amazon

How to Run Cosmos 3 Nano

Install Ollama, then run:

ollama run cosmos-3

Weights on Hugging Face: nvidia/Cosmos3-Nano.

Published Benchmark Scores

Quality scores as published by the model's authors or an independent evaluator — not throughput, and not measured by us.

BenchmarkScoreProvenance
R-Bench (Image-to-Video, open-source)2 / 2 2nd best (rank)vendor-claimed · NVIDIA Cosmos 3 (launch)

Best for: robotics, world simulation, video generation, action reasoning, synthetic data.

Can I Run Cosmos 3 Nano on My GPU?

Other Cosmos 3 Sizes

Cosmos 3 Nano — Frequently Asked Questions

How much VRAM does Cosmos 3 Nano need?
About 10 GB at BF16 — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. The cache grows with context length and is added on top; the table above folds it in. Apple Silicon counts unified memory toward the same figure.
Does Cosmos 3 Nano run on an RTX 4090 (24 GB)?
Yes. Cosmos 3 Nano needs about 10 GB at BF16, inside a 24 GB card, at an estimated 104 tokens/sec.
How do I run Cosmos 3 Nano locally?
Install Ollama and run `ollama run cosmos-3`. That pulls the weights and starts a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint; after the download nothing leaves the machine.
What other sizes does Cosmos 3 come in?
Cosmos 3 Super (39 GB), Cosmos 3 Nano (10 GB), Cosmos 3 Edge (3 GB). Every size shares the family's training and licence; the larger ones score higher and need proportionally more memory.

← All Cosmos 3 models | VRAM calculator | Check your own hardware