How fast will local models feel on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB?

Local LLM speed on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB

The Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB has 512 GB of unified memory and 819 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_MFits25 tok/s0.4 s
GLM-5.3 FlashUD-Q4_K_XLFits20 tok/s0.4 s
GPT-OSS 20BMXFP4Fits204 tok/s0.3 s
Gemma 4 26B A4BQ4_K_MFits171 tok/s0.3 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits230 tok/s0.3 s
Ornith 1.5 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits213 tok/s0.3 s
DeepSeek V4 FlashUD-Q4_K_XLFits29 tok/s0.4 s
GPT-OSS 120BMXFP4Fits154 tok/s0.3 s
Gemma 4 31BQ4_K_MFits23 tok/s0.4 s
Llama 3.1 8BQ4_K_MFits63 tok/s0.3 s
Qwen 3.5 9BQ4_K_MFits68 tok/s0.4 s
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14BQ4_K_MFits36 tok/s0.4 s
Ornith 1.5 9BQ4_K_MFits67 tok/s0.4 s
Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_MFits20 tok/s0.5 s
Qwen3 30B A3BQ4_K_MFits193 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.