M4 16GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5090 for local LLMs
26 reports on the M4 16GB and 170 on the NVIDIA RTX 5090
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Gemma 4 26B · 4B active at 4-bit, the M4 16GB has 30.9 generation tokens/s (one run); the NVIDIA RTX 5090 has 243.9 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 13809.2 tokens/s (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 14.9x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 (120 GB/s on the M4 16GB, 1,792 on the NVIDIA RTX 5090).
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 120 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 4.3 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 26
- Memory
- 32GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 1,792 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 419 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 170
Measured on both
Generation and prompt processing speeds 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 bit class. Each side shows the engines and reported context behind its median. Context can mean a configured window or prompt depth, so these are community comparisons with differing settings. How to read these
| Model | M4 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 5090 |
|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active4-bit | 30.9one runllama.cpp64K context | 243.9one runPP 13809.2 (one run)llama.cppcontext not stated |
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 | M4 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 5090 |
|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 114.5 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 44.9 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 20.3 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 163.0 t/sQ5_K_M |
| 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 | 44.9 t/sQ6_K |
| 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: M4 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 5090
Every report on each card, with its source: M4 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 5090