M3 Pro 18GB vs AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB for local LLMs
1 report on the M3 Pro 18GB and 12 on the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3 8B at 4-bit, the M3 Pro 18GB runs at 25.2 tokens per second (one run) and the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB at 98.8 (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 4.2x higher on the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB (154 GB/s on the M3 Pro 18GB, 640 on the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB).
- Memory
- 18GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 154 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 7.4 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 1
- Memory
- 16GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 640 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 195 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 12
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 | M3 Pro 18GB | AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 8B4-bit | 25.2one run | 98.8one 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 | M3 Pro 18GB | AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 8B | 33.8 t/sQ3_K_M | 54.2 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 41.7 t/sQ2_K |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 138.0 t/sQ2_K |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 41.7 t/sQ2_K |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 35.1 t/sQ2_K | 93.0 t/sQ3_K_S |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M3 Pro 18GB · AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M3 Pro 18GB · AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB