M5 Pro 48GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5090 for local LLMs
9 reports on the M5 Pro 48GB and 170 on the NVIDIA RTX 5090
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.5 27B at 4-bit, the M5 Pro 48GB has generation speed not reported; prompt processing 461.0 tokens/s (one run); the NVIDIA RTX 5090 has 30.1 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 1515.8 tokens/s (one run). Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 5.8x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 (307 GB/s on the M5 Pro 48GB, 1,792 on the NVIDIA RTX 5090).
- Memory
- 48GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 307 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 9
- 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 | M5 Pro 48GB | NVIDIA RTX 5090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.5 27B4-bit | -0 runsPP 461.0 (one run)engine not stated4K context | 30.1one runPP 1515.8 (one run)llama.cpp1K context |
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 | M5 Pro 48GB | NVIDIA RTX 5090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.5 27B | 12.0 t/sQ6_K | 44.9 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 12.0 t/sQ6_K | 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 | 47.5 t/sQ5_K_M | 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 | 12.0 t/sQ6_K | 44.9 t/sQ6_K |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 23.2 t/sQ8_0 | 114.5 t/sQ6_K |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Pro 48GB · NVIDIA RTX 5090
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Pro 48GB · NVIDIA RTX 5090