What GPU do I need to run baidu/Unlimited-OCR?
3.3B parameters, published in BF16. View on Hugging Face
Set up Unlimited-OCRUnlimited-OCR is published by baidu on Hugging Face, with 3,181,811 downloads and 4,167 likes to date. It's a UnlimitedOCRForCausalLM model built for image-text-to-text, published natively in BF16.
VRAM required & cheapest live GPU fit
Required VRAM = weight size at each precision times a flat 1.2 overhead for activations and fragmentation. The KV-cache grows with context and is not in that factor; it is listed per model below where the architecture is published. Full formula and assumptions: methodology.
| Precision | Weight size | Required VRAM | Cheapest live fit | GPUs needed | Est. $/hr (full fit) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 | 6.2 GB | 7.5 GB | RTX 3060 | 1 | $0.110/hr |
| FP8 (quantized) | 3.1 GB | 3.7 GB | RTX 4000 SFF Ada | 1 | $0.198/hr |
| INT4 (quantized) | 1.6 GB | 1.9 GB | RTX 3060 | 1 | $0.110/hr |
A GPU is only matched to a row if its hardware supports that precision, and the primary recommendation is always a single-GPU fit when one exists.
INT4 requires a quantized checkpoint actually published for this model, check its Hugging Face page before relying on this row.
Cheapest way to run Unlimited-OCR at its published (BF16) precision: 1× RTX 3060, at $0.110/hr per GPU ($0.110/hr total). Quantizing to FP8 or INT4 (rows above) can cost less, but requires a compatible quantized checkpoint to exist for this model.
Unlimited-OCR: KV cache by context length
The KV cache is the memory the attention layers hold for every token of context, on top of the weights. It is not part of the flat 1.2x overhead in the table above, grows with context length and with every concurrent request, and is why a long-context deployment needs more VRAM than the table shows.
KV-cache size for Unlimited-OCR is not published for this architecture, so no figure is shown.
Unlimited-OCR: common questions
Does Unlimited-OCR fit on a 8 GB GPU?
Yes. At BF16 it needs 7.5 GB of VRAM, so an 8 GB card holds it with 0.5 GB to spare. A 6 GB card is not enough for it at BF16.
What is the least VRAM Unlimited-OCR can run in?
1.9 GB, at INT4 (quantized), which fits a 6 GB card, against 7.5 GB at BF16. That row assumes an INT4 checkpoint has actually been published for this model, so check its Hugging Face page before planning around it.
Weight-to-VRAM math, the fit rules, and how live prices are normalized: full methodology.
Alternatives at this size
Other models for image-text-to-text within about a third of Unlimited-OCR's 3.3B parameters, from other model lines.
- Qwen3.5-4B (4.7B, BF16)
- DeepSeek-OCR (3.3B, BF16)
- gemma-3-4b-it (4.3B, BF16)
- Cosmos-Reason2-2B (2.4B, BF16)
- Rax-4.5 (2.3B, BF16)
More on Unlimited-OCR
Fits on an 8 GB GPU at BF16: every model that fits in 8 GB.
Best vision-language models: how Unlimited-OCR ranks against the rest.
Best OCR and document parsing models: how Unlimited-OCR ranks against the rest.
Related reading: H100 pricing and specs, How much VRAM you need for LLMs, Serving LLMs with vLLM, vLLM vs TensorRT-LLM vs SGLang, and Best GPU for LLM inference.
