… At those resolutions, the performance gap between a top-tier AM4 chip versus a current-generation AM5 processor tends to narrow, especially because the GPU becomes the limiting factor before the CPU does. …
… The RTX 3080 is nearly the perfect GPU for this. Nvidia's 2020 flagship launched at $699 as a legitimate 4K card, and it regularly shows up on eBay and secondhand marketplaces for around $300 on a good day. …
… The correct answer is GPU VRAM. While CPU speed matters for CPU-only inference, having enough VRAM to load the model onto your GPU is the single biggest factor in how fast responses generate. A GPU with 16GB VRAM can run models that would crawl on a CPU alone. …