Can I run Phi-4 Reasoning Vision 15B?

Phi-4 Reasoning Vision 15B is Microsoft's open-weight (MIT-licensed, so freely usable commercially) model built for vision and reasoning rather than general chat. It is a dense 15B-parameter model, which means the whole thing loads and runs on every token. At a 4-bit quant it lands around 9.1 GB, so you want a 12 GB card like an RTX 3060 to keep it fully on the GPU, and you need at least 16 GB of system RAM. Drop to a 2-bit build (about 6.3 GB) if you are squeezing onto tighter hardware, though quality suffers at that level.

In daily use it feels brisk on a 12 GB RTX 3060 at roughly 34 tokens per second at 4-bit, comfortable for reading speed, and a 24 GB RTX 4090 pushes that to around 94 tokens per second. On an Apple M-series Max you can expect about 38 tokens per second. The context window is 16K, which is modest, so treat it as a working scratchpad rather than a place to dump whole documents. Even at 8K of context the full memory footprint climbs to roughly 10.5 GB, so leave headroom on a 12 GB card.

Positioned against its siblings, Phi-4 14B and Qwen 3 14B are the picks if you want a general chat-and-reasoning model, since this build trades some of that breadth for image understanding. Phi-4 Mini 3.8B is the lighter option when memory is tight. The standout trait here is that you get genuine multimodal reasoning at a footprint that still fits a single mid-range GPU, and the MIT license means no commercial restrictions to worry about.