# What’s the Best Open-Source AI Video Model You Can Actually Run? (8GB → 24GB VRAM) > Source: > Published: 2026-07-03 16:01:01+00:00 Member-only story # What’s the Best Open-Source AI Video Model You Can Actually Run? (8GB → 24GB VRAM) *The honest case for self-hosting in 2026 — and when paying Runway still wins.* Read the article for free [.]here The graphics card in your desk is doing a lot less than it could. Most of the time it sits idle. When you do use it, you’re running games or maybe a local language model. As of mid-2026, that same card can also generate video — five to twenty seconds at a time, in 720p or 1080p depending on which model you pick and how patient you are with render times. Search ‘**best open-source AI video model 2026**’ and the first six results disagree on which model is best, which numbers to trust, and which ones will fit in 12GB of VRAM. ## The landscape is louder than it is honest The current leaderboards and aggregator sites paint a picture of an open-source ecosystem that has already surpassed commercial APIs. Their headline numbers: **Wan 2.2** at 84.7% on VBench, **Open-Sora 2.0** closing the Sora gap to 0.69%, **HunyuanVideo’s** 96.4% visual quality on a 4090. These aggregators scrape GitHub READMEs, mix up model versions, hallucinate VRAM requirements, and present it all as a buying guide. When…