Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B vs Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3

Side-by-side comparison of VRAM requirements, quantization, context length, and hardware compatibility.

Specifications

Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8BLlama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3
Parameters8B8.0B
Context8K131K
ArchitectureLlamaForCausalLMLlamaForCausalLM
LicenseOtherOther
Downloads13.1K1.7K
ReleasedJan 2026Oct 2025

VRAM by Quantization: Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B vs Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3

QuantizationBitsDolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B VRAMLlama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3 VRAM
BF1616.0016.6 GB16.6 GB

Verdict

Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B needs less VRAM at BF16 (16.6 GB vs 16.6 GB), so it fits on smaller GPUs. Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3 supports a longer context window (131K tokens). Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B is the more widely downloaded of the two.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which needs less VRAM, Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B or Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3?

At BF16, Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B needs 16.6 GB and Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3 needs 16.6 GB, so Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B is the lighter option to run locally.

Which has a longer context window, Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B or Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3?

Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B supports 8,192 tokens and Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3 supports 131,072 tokens.

What is the difference between Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B and Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3?

Dolphin 2.9 Llama3 8B is a 8B model from dphn (Llama 3 family), while Llama 3.1 Nemotron Safety Guard 8B v3 is a 8.0B model from NVIDIA (Llama 3 family). Compare their VRAM requirements above to see which fits your GPU or Mac.