Ideogram 4 on 12 GB of VRAM
Not entirely. Even Q4_1 is 2.7 GB over 12 GB, so ComfyUI keeps part of it in system RAM. Ideogram's open-weights model (June 2026, non-commercial). It uses two transformers at once - a main one and an "unconditional" one - so it needs about twice the memory of one file.
The smallest sensible file, Q4_1 (6.2 GB (×2, both loaded)), needs about 14.7 GB - 2.7 GB more than 12 GB GPU has. ComfyUI can still run it by streaming part of the model from system RAM. How much slower that is depends on your ComfyUI version, the file format and the PCIe link - see the note below.
Also try the FP8 file (9.3 GB) on NVIDIA GPUs. It does not fit entirely, but a current ComfyUI streams the overflow from RAM and native 8-bit files often beat a small GGUF that does fit. Dynamic VRAM →
01Other amounts of VRAM
02Every file, on 12 GB
| File | Size | Needed | On this card | Quality | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q8_0 GGUF · molbal | 10.1 GB ×2 | 22.6 GB | 10.6 GB too big | practically identical to the original | Hugging Face → |
| FP8 SAFETENSORS · Comfy-Org | 9.3 GB ×2 | 20.9 GB | 8.9 GB too big | practically identical to the original | Hugging Face → |
| INT8 SAFETENSORS · Comfy-Org | 9.6 GB ×2 | 21.5 GB | 9.5 GB too big | practically identical to the original | Hugging Face → |
| Q5_1 GGUF · molbal | 7.3 GB ×2 | 17.0 GB | 5.0 GB too big | close; small differences in fine detail | Hugging Face → |
| Q4_1 ← GGUF · molbal | 6.2 GB ×2 | 14.7 GB | 2.7 GB too big | good; some loss in fine detail and text | Hugging Face → |
“Needed” adds 1.5 GB of working memory for Ideogram 4 and a 0.8 GB reserve. Sizes 2026-10-01. Needs two transformer files loaded together (main + unconditional). GGUF files need the molbal fork of ComfyUI-GGUF. No 16-bit weights were released.
03What to download
| Part | File | Folder | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | ideogram4-transformer-q4_1.gguf main model Q4_1 · molbal/ideogram-4-gguf | models/unet | 6.2 GB | Download → |
| Model | ideogram4-unconditional_transformer-q4_1.gguf unconditional model, loaded together with the main one Q4_1 · molbal/ideogram-4-gguf | models/unet | 6.2 GB | Download → |
| Text encoder | qwen3vl_8b_fp8_scaled.safetensors Qwen3-VL 8B FP8 · Comfy-Org/Ideogram-4 | models/text_encoders | 10.6 GB | Download → |
| VAE | flux2-vae.safetensors FLUX.2 VAE · Comfy-Org/Ideogram-4 | models/vae | 0.3 GB | Download → |
| Total download · keep about the same free on disk | 23.3 GB | |||
Alternatives: Qwen3-VL 8B NVFP4 (6.3 GB). FP4 files are listed only as alternatives unless the GPU is an RTX 50 (Blackwell). Sizes from Hugging Face, 2026-10-01.