Table of Contents
Qwen 2.5 VL (vision-language) ships in 3B and 7B sizes. The 7B variant is the most capable open-weight VLM in 2026 — strong on document analysis, OCR, image Q&A, and chart reading. It fits the 5060 Ti at FP8 with comfortable headroom for context.
Qwen 2.5 VL 7B at FP8 fits the 5060 Ti 16 GB with room for ~8 concurrent users. Image-Q&A latency ~480 ms (1024×1024 image + prompt). Document OCR ~3 seconds for an A4 page. Best entry-tier VLM hosting we benchmark.
Qwen 2.5 VL overview
- 3B and 7B parameter variants
- Native image input — text + image in same context window
- Strong on documents, charts, OCR
- 32K text context, supports up to 224×224 → 4096×4096 image inputs
- Apache 2.0 license
VRAM fit
| Variant | Precision | VRAM (weights) | KV @ 8K + image tokens | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 2.5 VL 3B | FP16 | 6 GB | +1.5 GB | 7.5 GB |
| Qwen 2.5 VL 7B | FP16 | 14 GB | +2.5 GB | 16.5 GB tight |
| Qwen 2.5 VL 7B | FP8 | 7 GB | +2 GB | 9 GB comfortable |
| Qwen 2.5 VL 7B | AWQ-INT4 | 4.5 GB | +2 GB | 6.5 GB |
Inference benchmarks
| Workload | Latency on 5060 Ti |
|---|---|
| Single image Q&A (1024×1024 image, 100-token prompt) | ~480 ms TTFT, then ~58 tok/s |
| A4 document OCR | ~3 s end-to-end |
| Chart reading (parse + analyse) | ~1.2 s |
| Multi-image comparison (4 images) | ~1.8 s |
| Aggregate throughput (50 concurrent users) | ~520 tok/s |
Use cases
- Document OCR + structuring — PDFs, invoices, contracts
- Image accessibility (alt-text generation)
- Chart Q&A for analytics dashboards
- Visual product search
- UI screenshot analysis
Verdict
For self-hosted VLM workloads, Qwen 2.5 VL 7B on a 5060 Ti is the price/capability sweet spot. Better than older Llama 3.2 11B Vision and dramatically cheaper than Claude or GPT-4o.
Bottom line
For document analysis, image Q&A, and chart reading at £119/mo, this is the cheapest credible deployment. For higher concurrency step up to a 5090.
