Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct vs Phi-3.5-vision-instruct

Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 5 October 2026.

Qwen · A · Open weights
Params
8.8 B
Context
—
30d
5.2 M
apache-2.0 · commercial OK
microsoft · B · Open weights
Params
4.2 B
Context
131,072
30d
805 K
mit · commercial OK

Specification comparison

Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.

Specification Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct Phi-3.5-vision-instruct
Deployment Open weights · also via API Open weights
Parameters 8.8 B 4.2 B
Architecture Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration Phi3VForCausalLM
Context length 262,144 131,072
Licence apache-2.0 mit
Commercial use Allowed Allowed
Languages — 1
Downloads 30d 5,227,079 805,145
Downloads all time 75.8 M 20.5 M
Quantizations on the Hub SAFETENSORS SAFETENSORS
Gated No No
First seen on the Hub 2025-10-11 2024-08-16
API input price / 1M tokens $0.25 not on OpenRouter
API output price / 1M tokens $0.75 not on OpenRouter
Est. cost per 1M input + 1M output tokens $1.00 not on OpenRouter
Cached input / 1M tokens $0.12 not on OpenRouter
AA Intelligence Index 7.3 not on OpenRouter
AA Coding Index — not on OpenRouter
AA Agentic Index — not on OpenRouter
Max output tokens 235,929 not on OpenRouter
API providers 1 not on OpenRouter
Tool calling Yes not on OpenRouter
Reasoning mode No not on OpenRouter

API cost

Estimated cost of 1M input + 1M output tokens via OpenRouter

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct $1.00

Download trend

Daily snapshots, last 90 days (28 Jul – 25 Oct)

20.2 M796 K
Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct Phi-3.5-vision-instruct

VRAM side by side

On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted

Phi-3.5-vision-instruct · fp16 @ 128K ctx 19.6 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably
Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct · fp16 21.1 GB / 24 GB
⚠️ Tight — reduce context

Adjacent comparisons