M1 Ultra 128GB vs NVIDIA RTX 4090 for local LLMs
3 reports on the M1 Ultra 128GB and 41 on the NVIDIA RTX 4090
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.8 27B at 4-bit, the M1 Ultra 128GB runs at 25.1 tokens per second (one run) and the NVIDIA RTX 4090 at 31.5 (2 runs). Those are community reports whose engines and settings differ, so the gap is a rough sign, not a controlled measure of the two cards. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 23% higher on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (819 GB/s on the M1 Ultra 128GB, 1,008 on the NVIDIA RTX 4090).
- Memory
- 128GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 819 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 21 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 3
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 1,008 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 330 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 41
Measured on both
Median tokens per second from plain runs (one device, one request, no speculative decoding, the whole model in the device's memory) of the same model size at the same quant level. Engines and context lengths can still differ between the runs. How to read these
| Model | M1 Ultra 128GB | NVIDIA RTX 4090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B4-bit | 25.1one run | 31.52 runs |
Estimated by the calculator
The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape. Where a model was also measured above, the measurement wins.
| Model | M1 Ultra 128GB | NVIDIA RTX 4090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 7.5 t/sFP16 | 36.5 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 34.0 t/sQ5_K_S | 19.6 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | 53.5 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 23.5 t/sFP16 | 129.3 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 7.5 t/sFP16 | 36.5 t/sQ4_K_M |
| GLM-5.3 320B · 18B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 20.2 t/sFP16 | 82.3 t/sQ5_K_S |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M1 Ultra 128GB · NVIDIA RTX 4090
Every report on each card, with its source: M1 Ultra 128GB · NVIDIA RTX 4090