How fast will local models feel on the Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB?

Local LLM speed on the Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB

The Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB has 128 GB of unified memory and 546 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is what mostly decides generation speed. Below is the expected speed for each model at the best quantization that fits.

ModelQuantizationMemoryGenerationFirst token
Qwen 3.6/3.8 27BQ4_K_MFits17 tok/s0.5 s
GLM-5.3 FlashUD-IQ1_SFits54 tok/s0.4 s
GPT-OSS 20BMXFP4Fits136 tok/s0.3 s
Gemma 4 26B A4BQ4_K_MFits114 tok/s0.3 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits154 tok/s0.3 s
Ornith 1.5 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits142 tok/s0.3 s
DeepSeek V4 FlashUD-IQ2_MFits73 tok/s0.4 s
GPT-OSS 120BMXFP4Fits103 tok/s0.3 s
Gemma 4 31BQ4_K_MFits15 tok/s0.5 s
Llama 3.1 8BQ4_K_MFits53 tok/s0.4 s
Qwen 3.5 9BQ4_K_MFits45 tok/s0.4 s
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14BQ4_K_MFits29 tok/s0.4 s
Ornith 1.5 9BQ4_K_MFits45 tok/s0.4 s
Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_MFits13 tok/s0.6 s
Qwen3 30B A3BQ4_K_MFits128 tok/s0.3 s

Other 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.