VRAM is the memory that lives on your graphics card — its own private, blazing-fast workspace. It's the single most important number for running AI at home, and it's usually the thing you run out of first.
To run at full speed, a model wants to fit entirely in VRAM — all its weights sitting right next to the chip that does the maths. Picture a desk: only what fits on the desktop can be worked on quickly.
Run out of room and the overflow spills into your normal system memory — like shoving papers into a filing cabinet across the room. It still works, but every trip is slow, and the model crawls.
That's why people obsess over the number. A twelve gigabyte card, like a thirty sixty, fits a small model comfortably. Big models need a bigger desk, or they spill over and crawl.
So VRAM is your desk space for AI. The bigger it is, the bigger the brain you can run at full speed. That's VRAM. Off the Cloud.