Compare · prices checked 2026-09-03
L4 vs Tesla T4: specs, price per hour, which to rent
NVIDIA L4 (24 GB, $0.225/hr) against NVIDIA Tesla T4 (16 GB, $0.104/hr): public specs side by side, live fixed prices from our sheet, what fits in each card's VRAM, and a verdict written for real workloads — both are rentable right now.
L4 vs Tesla T4 specifications
Public NVIDIA figures (dense, non-sparsity). The last column is L4 relative to Tesla T4.
| Spec | L4 | Tesla T4 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Ada Lovelace (2023) | Turing (2018) | — |
| VRAM | 24 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6 | +50% |
| Memory bandwidth | 300 GB/s | 320 GB/s | −6% |
| FP16 tensor (dense) | 121 TFLOPS | 65 TFLOPS | +86% |
| FP32 | 30.3 TFLOPS | 8.1 TFLOPS | +274% |
| CUDA cores | 7,680 | 2,560 | +200% |
| TDP | 72 W | 70 W | +3% |
| PCIe · NVLink | Gen 4.0 · no NVLink | Gen 3.0 · no NVLink | — |
| PowerScore (RTX 3090 = 100) | 85 | 46 | +85% |
| Max GPUs per machine | 4× | 8× | — |
L4 vs Tesla T4 price per hour
Fixed rates from our sheet — every on-demand price is the marketplace median × 0.70, rounded down. Monthly = 730 hours.
| Rate | L4 | Tesla T4 | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-demand, per GPU-hour | $0.225 | $0.104 | Tesla T4 (−54%) |
| Interruptible, per GPU-hour | $0.112 | $0.052 | Tesla T4 |
| Reserved (3 mo), per GPU-hour | $0.146 | $0.067 | Tesla T4 |
| On-demand, per month | $164 | $76 | Tesla T4 |
| Market median (reference) | $0.32 | $0.15 | — |
| $ per 1,000 FP16 TFLOP-hours | $1.86 | $1.60 | Tesla T4 (better value) |
| $ per GB of VRAM per hour | $0.0094 | $0.0065 | Tesla T4 (better value) |
Try a full month with storage and bandwidth in the GPU cost calculator.
What fits in VRAM: 24 GB vs 16 GB
| Workload | L4 | Tesla T4 |
|---|---|---|
| Largest LLM in FP16, one card | ~8B | ~3B |
| Largest LLM at 4-bit, one card | ~32B | ~24B |
| Flux dev (FP8, ~17 GB) | fits | tight |
| Wan 2.x 14B video (offloaded) | yes | no |
| 70B 4-bit LLM on one card | no | no |
Rules of thumb: ~2.4 GB per billion parameters in FP16 all-in, ~0.62 GB in 4-bit. Full tables in the VRAM guide.
Verdict: which should you rent?
The L4 is the T4's Ada successor: 24 vs 16 GB, about twice the tensor throughput, AV1 encode, still 72 W and single-slot. The T4 is cheaper for tiny models; the L4 is the better rental for anything that touches video or exceeds 16 GB.
- Cheaper per hour: Tesla T4 ($0.104 vs $0.225, −54%).
- More VRAM: L4 (24 GB vs 16 GB).
- More FP16 throughput: L4 (about 1.9×).
- Best value per TFLOP-hour: Tesla T4.
- Best value per GB of VRAM: Tesla T4.
- Multi-GPU: L4 over PCIe · Tesla T4 over PCIe.
Related comparisons
L4 vs Tesla T4: FAQ
Deeper reading: H100 vs H200 vs B200, RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090, how cloud GPU pricing works.
Is the L4 faster than the Tesla T4?
On dense FP16 tensor throughput the L4 leads by about 1.9× (121 vs 65 TFLOPS). Memory bandwidth matters as much for inference: L4 300 GB/s vs Tesla T4 320 GB/s.
Which is cheaper to rent, the L4 or the Tesla T4?
The Tesla T4: $0.104/hr on-demand versus $0.225/hr — 54% less. Interruptible rates are $0.112 (L4) and $0.052 (Tesla T4). Per TFLOP-hour the better value is the Tesla T4.
Which has more VRAM and what does that change?
The L4 has 24 GB versus 16 GB. In LLM terms that is roughly a 8B FP16 model (or ~32B in 4-bit) on one card against 3B FP16 (~24B 4-bit). If the model does not fit, speed is irrelevant.
Can I rent both on PowerGPU right now?
Yes — 24 × L4 and 13 × Tesla T4 are online as this page renders, deployable in about 30 seconds, billed per second, paid in crypto with no KYC.