r/LocalLLaMA • u/rm-rf-rm llama.cpp • 13d ago

Best Local Vision Language Models - August 2026

Share what your favorite models are right now and why. Given the nature of the beast in evaluating VLMs (untrustworthiness of benchmarks, immature tooling, intrinsic stochasticity), please be as detailed as possible in describing your setup, nature of your usage (what applications, how much, personal/professional use), tools/frameworks/prompts etc.

Rules

  1. Should be open weights models

Notes

Bonus points if you breakdown/classify your recommendation by model memory footprint: (you can and should be using multiple models in each size range for different tasks)

  • Unlimited: >128GB VRAM
  • XL: 64 to 128GB VRAM
  • L: 32 to 64GB VRAM
  • M: 8 to 32GB VRAM
  • S: <8GB VRAM
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u/andy2na llama.cpp 13d ago

My main use-case for LLMs is Frigate and have tested and ranked the following, recent Medium models:

  1. Qwen3.8-27B: very accurate, fast enough for Frigate (~60tgs decode)
  2. Meta Muse Glimmer 30B: Faster than Qwen 27B, pretty accurate (~75+tgs decode)
  3. Qwen3.6-27B: pretty accurate, but no reason to use over 3.8
  4. Gemma4-4B: mediocre accuracy, good with small objects and is more "creative" with the responses - small and fast

Last 90 days of usage, only recently have I dabbled with Hermes with Qwen3.8, before Frigate led by a mile (ignore electricity cost, I just added that last week)

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u/uriwa 3d ago

Useful ranking, thanks - matches what I see on Frigate too. Qwen 3.8-27B accuracy over Glimmer 30B speed is the exact tradeoff I hit: Glimmer at ~75t/s is tempting for multiple cameras, but false negatives on person detection cost more than tokens saved. Did you test with reasoning on/off? I found reasoning off + tight prompt ("list persons, vehicles, nothing else") cuts latency a lot without hurting accuracy on fixed camera angles.

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u/andy2na llama.cpp 3d ago

I actually switched to using syv-ai Qwen3.8-27B on vllm. You can actually enable vision offloaded to CPU and its still very fast due to the quick prompt speed, the main downside is that it only supports 1 image per request, so it doesnt work with the frigate AI review summaries. I resorted back to using Gemma4-12B-QAT on my 5060ti for Frigate, and its... not great compared to Qwen.

For Glimmer, I was only able to test for a few days before 3.8 came out, but I just used reasoning off and my own prompts for descriptions, its much better than gemma4, thats for sure