The RTX 3090 offers a compelling combination of performance and 24GB of VRAM, making it a better choice for local LLM and AI workloads than newer Nvidia Blackwell GPUs like the RTX 5070 and even the RTX 5080, due to VRAM limitations and pricing.
A startup called Backprop has demonstrated that a single Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU, released in 2020, can handle serving a modest large language model (LLM) like Llama 3.1 8B to over 100 concurrent users with acceptable throughput. This suggests that expensive enterprise GPUs may not be necessary for scaling LLMs to a few thousand users.
How to get oobabooga/text-generation-webui running on Windows or Linux with LLaMa-30b 4bit mode via GPTQ-for-LLaMa on an RTX 3090 start to finish.
