HARDWARE FIT CHECK โ€ข Google Gemma 4 26B MoE + Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB Unified Memory)20.23 GB / 236 GB VRAM

Can I Run Google Gemma 4 26B MoE on Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB Unified Memory)?

Full VRAM footprint analysis, tokens/sec generation benchmark, and copy-paste Ollama & vLLM runtime commands for running Google Gemma 4 26B MoE (26.4B) on Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB Unified Memory) (236 GB).

โœ… Runs 100% in GPU VRAM (Optimal Headroom)20.23 GB (9%)~173 t/s

Model & Target Hardware

interactive
High-Speed Consumer GPU & Apple Silicon Daily Assistant
Google Gemma 4 26B MoE on Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB Unified Memory)

โœ“ Fits Comfortably in VRAM

โœ“ FITS IN VRAM
Required VRAM
20.23 GB
9% of hardware capacity (236 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
~173 tok/s
4.2B active params @ 890 GB/s
Available Headroom
+215.77 GB
Safe for OS display & full context
Memory Allocation & Headroom
20.23 GB allocated of 236 GB capacity
9% utilized
Weights: 15.84 GB
KV: (32K): 3.09 GB
Overhead: 1.3 GB
Free Headroom: +215.77 GB
โšก Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~173 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB Unified Memory) (890 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~2,509 tok/s) is compute-bound and utilizes GPU Tensor cores. Actual latency varies with FlashAttention-2 and runtime engine (Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp).
OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1 OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0 ollama run gemma4:26b

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx โ€ข KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw52.8 GB3.09 GB58.49 GB (25%)~62 t/sFITS
Q8_08.5 bpw27.98 GB3.09 GB32.8 GB (14%)~109 t/sFITS
Q6_K6.56 bpw21.65 GB3.09 GB26.25 GB (11%)~135 t/sFITS
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw18.74 GB3.09 GB23.24 GB (10%)~152 t/sFITS
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw15.84 GB3.09 GB20.23 GB (9%)~173 t/sFITS
FP44.25 bpw13.99 GB3.09 GB18.32 GB (8%)~190 t/sFITS
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw10.82 GB3.09 GB15.04 GB (6%)~229 t/sFITS

Local Hardware Configurations & Pricing

High-bandwidth VRAM specs and current market prices
Apple Silicon236 GB VRAM

Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB Unified Memory)

Massive MoE models (DeepSeek V4.1 Q3/Q4) & 70B FP16 workstation

890 GB/s210W TDP
Consumer GPU32 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)

Maximum tokens/sec on 27Bโ€“35B models & Blackwell FP4 quantization

1792 GB/s575W TDP
Consumer GPU24 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB GDDR6X)

The 24GB CUDA enthusiast standard for 14Bโ€“32B Q4_K_M models

1008 GB/s450W TDP
Multi-GPU Rig48 GB VRAM

2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)

Best price-to-VRAM homelab rig for 70B Q4_K_M & Qwen 3.8 27B Q8

936 GB/s700W TDP

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