English

Profiling LoRA/QLoRA Fine-Tuning Efficiency on Consumer GPUs: An RTX 4060 Case Study

Machine Learning 2025-09-17 v1 Artificial Intelligence Performance

Abstract

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with parameter-efficient techniques such as LoRA and QLoRA has enabled adaptation of foundation models on modest hardware. Yet the efficiency of such training on consumer-grade GPUs, especially under strict 8 GB VRAM limits, remains underexplored. We present a controlled profiling study of LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning using the Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct model on a single NVIDIA RTX 4060. Across three representative configurations, we systematically vary batch size, sequence length, optimizer choice (AdamW vs. PagedAdamW), and precision (fp16 vs. bf16). We report throughput (tokens/s), time per 10k tokens, and VRAM footprint, alongside energy estimates derived from GPU board power limits. Our results show that paged optimizers improve throughput by up to 25% (628 tok/s vs. 500 tok/s baseline), while bf16 degrades efficiency relative to fp16. Despite 8 GB constraints, sequence lengths up to 2048 tokens were feasible using parameter-efficient strategies. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic case study of LLM fine-tuning efficiency on consumer GPUs, providing reproducible benchmarks and practical guidelines for resource-constrained researchers and practitioners.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.12229,
  title  = {Profiling LoRA/QLoRA Fine-Tuning Efficiency on Consumer GPUs: An RTX 4060 Case Study},
  author = {MSR Avinash},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12229},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Primary category: cs.LG (Machine Learning); secondary: cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence). LaTeX source with figures included

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:37:29.088Z