How fast will Gemma 4 26B A4B feel on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB?

Gemma 4 26B A4B on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB

Gemma 4 26B A4B is a 25.81B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (3.8B active per token). At Q4_K_M it needs about 17.7 GB of memory. The Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB has 384 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 171 tokens/sec (99–242), with the first token after 0.3 s for a short prompt. This estimate is interpolated from benchmarks of similar setups.

Speed by quantization

Quantization	File size	Memory	Generation	First token	Source
Q4_K_M	16.9 GB	Fits	171 tok/s	0.3 s	Derived
Q8_0	26.9 GB	Fits	108 tok/s	0.3 s	Derived
FP16	50.5 GB	Fits	57 tok/s	0.3 s	Derived

Gemma 4 26B A4B on other hardware

H200 141GB (cloud) · 775 tok/s at Q4_K_M
H100 80GB (cloud) · 541 tok/s at Q4_K_M
A100 80GB (cloud) · 329 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB · 289 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96GB · 289 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XTX 24GB · 240 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB · 227 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4090 24GB · 163 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB · 161 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB · 151 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB · 114 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB · 92 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · 87 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5080 16GB · 83 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti 16GB · 81 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB · 77 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB · 70 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XT 20GB · 66 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Mini M4 Pro 64GB · 57 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M4 Pro 24GB · 57 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB · 55 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB · 51 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M3 Max 48GB · 50 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB (Strix Halo) · 49 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA DGX Spark 128GB · 44 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4070 12GB · 44 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · 38 tok/s at Q4_K_M
CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) · 24 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M2 Pro 16GB · won't run

Other models on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B · 25 tok/s at Q4_K_M
GLM-5.3 Flash · 20 tok/s at UD-Q4_K_XL
GPT-OSS 20B · 204 tok/s at MXFP4
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B · 230 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Ornith 1.5 35B A3B · 213 tok/s at Q4_K_M
DeepSeek V4 Flash · 29 tok/s at UD-Q4_K_XL
GPT-OSS 120B · 154 tok/s at MXFP4
Gemma 4 31B · 23 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Llama 3.1 8B · 63 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.5 9B · 68 tok/s at Q4_K_M
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B · 36 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Ornith 1.5 9B · 67 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Muse Glimmer 30B · 20 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen3 30B A3B · 193 tok/s at Q4_K_M

All models on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · Gemma 4 26B A4B on all hardware

Estimates for a short prompt on a single device. Measured numbers come from community benchmarks (r/LocalLLaMA, localscore.ai and more); others are derived from similar setups or projected from specs. Open source on GitHub.