Users report Gemma-4-31B models consume excessive KV cache memory, making them impractical compared to more efficient alternatives like Qwen3.5-27B.

A user with 40GB of VRAM cannot fit the Unsloth Gemma-4-31B-it-UD-Q8 model (35GB) at 2K context without additional KV quantization to Q4

By comparison, Qwen3.5-27B can run at full context on the same hardware without KV cache quantization

Qwen3.5-27B outperforms Gemma-4-31B on most benchmarks, making it a superior choice given the memory constraints

The inefficient KV cache architecture of Gemma-4 models may limit their practical deployment on consumer-grade hardware