Gemma 4 Vision: Why It Seems Blind (And How to Fix It)

People keep asking for better vision in Gemma 4, but here's the thing—the model actually has solid vision capabilities. The problem? Almost nobody knows how to turn them on. Gemma 4 comes with Variable Image Resolution, but the default vision budget is capped at 280 tokens (~645K pixels), which is basically like asking someone to read a document from across the room. It can't handle small details or OCR tasks. The good news: if you're using llama.cpp, you can unlock the full potential by tweaking just two parameters (--image-min-tokens and --image-max-tokens). Most people don't realize this, so they think the model is worse than it actually is. Worth checking out if you've been disappointed with Gemma 4's vision performance.