M2 Max 64GB vs NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded) for local LLMs
4 reports on the M2 Max 64GB and 7 on the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded)
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active at 4-bit, the M2 Max 64GB runs at 71.3 tokens per second (one run) and the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded) at 69.0 (one run). 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 1.5x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded) (410 GB/s on the M2 Max 64GB, 616 on the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded)).
- Memory
- 64GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 410 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 13.6 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 4
- Memory
- 22GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 616 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 108 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 7
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 | M2 Max 64GB | NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded) |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active4-bit | 71.3one run | 69.0one run |
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 | M2 Max 64GB | NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded) |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 32.9 t/sQ8_0 | 93.6 t/sQ3_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 10.4 t/sQ8_0 | 25.1 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 47.5 t/sQ2_K | 18.6 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 10.4 t/sQ8_0 | 25.1 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 28.2 t/sQ8_0 | 56.6 t/sQ4_K_M |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M2 Max 64GB · NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded)
Every report on each card, with its source: M2 Max 64GB · NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti 22GB (modded)