What are the hardware requirements for Granite 4.2 3B?

Granite 4.2 3B requires approximately 7.4 GB of VRAM and supports a context window of 128K tokens. Quantized variants may run on less VRAM; see the Quantized Models section on this page.

Who developed Granite 4.2 3B and how large is it?

Granite 4.2 3B is developed by ibm-granite, a model with 3b parameters. The model is published as open weights on Hugging Face and indexed on LLM Explorer with full benchmark history.

How does Granite 4.2 3B perform on standard benchmarks?

Granite 4.2 3B has the following published scores: LMSYS ELO 1290. Compare against reference models on this page or on the LLM Explorer leaderboards.

Granite 4.2 3B by ibm-granite — VRAM 7.4GB, 128K context

Name: Granite 4.2 3B
Author: ibm-granite

Granite 4.2 3B is an open-source language model by ibm-granite. Features: 3b LLM, VRAM: 7.4GB, Context: 128K, License: apache-2.0, LLM Explorer Score: 0.43, ELO: 1290.

Ar Base model:finetune:ibm-granit... Base model:ibm-granite/granite... Conversational Cs De En Endpoints compatible Es Fr Granite Granite-4.2 Ibm It Ja Ko Nl Pt Reasoning Region:us Safetensors Sharded Tensorflow Thinking Tool-calling Zh

Model Card on HF 🤗: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-3b

Granite 4.2 3B Benchmarks

LMSys ELO 1290 vs 1272 (so35) 1.4%

^nn.n% — How the model compares to the reference models: Anthropic Sonnet 3.5 ("so35"), GPT-4o ("gpt4o") or GPT-4 ("gpt4").

What is the LLM Explorer Rank (Score)

Granite 4.2 3B Parameters and Internals

LLM Name	Granite 4.2 3B
Repository 🤗	https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-3b
Base Model(s)	ibm-granite/granite-4.1-3b-base ibm-granite/granite-4.1-3b-base
Model Size	3b
Required VRAM	7.4 GB
Updated	2026-08-26
Maintainer	ibm-granite
Model Type	granite
Model Files	5.4 GB: 1-of-2 2.0 GB: 2-of-2
Supported Languages	en de es fr ja pt ar cs it ko nl zh
Model Architecture	GraniteForCausalLM
License	apache-2.0
Context Length	131072
Model Max Length	131072
Transformers Version	4.57.1
Tokenizer Class	GPT2Tokenizer
Padding Token	<\|im_end\|>
Vocabulary Size	100352
Torch Data Type	bfloat16
Errors	replace

Rank the Granite 4.2 3B capabilities

Have you tried this model? Rate its performance — this feedback helps the ML community find the right model for their needs.

Instruction Following and Task Automation
Factuality and Completeness of Knowledge
Censorship and Alignment
Data Analysis and Insight Generation
Text Generation
Text Summarization and Feature Extraction
Code Generation
Multi-Language Support and Translation

Quantized Models of the Granite 4.2 3B

Model	Likes	Downloads	VRAM
TwIL LM3 Pro	38	1774	2 GB
Granite 4.2 3B MLX 4bit	1	132	2 GB

Best Alternatives to Granite 4.2 3B

Best Alternatives	Context / RAM	Downloads	Likes
Granite 4.1 3B	128K / 6.8 GB	328863	100
Granite 4.2 3B Heretic	128K / 7.4 GB	626	1
Granite 4.2 3B	128K / 7.4 GB	300	1
Granite 4.1 3B Base	128K / 6.8 GB	8994	21
...e V1 Clm Nasasmd Granite4.1 3B	128K / 6.9 GB	203	1
...anite 4.1 3B Medical Reasoning	128K / 6.8 GB	262	1
... Granite 4.1 3B Claude Fable 5	128K / 6.8 GB	516	1
Granite 4.1 3B	128K / 6.8 GB	2076	6
Granite 4.2 3B Fp8	128K / 4.2 GB	137	2
Granite 4.1 3B SFT Fable5	128K / 6.8 GB	468	0