Everything measured on one Mac Studio, the mothership

On a Mac Studio (M5 Max, 36GB),how fast can it
make images?

Memory
36GB
Chip
M5 Max
CPU
18 cores
GPU
32 cores

The mothership: Mac Studio (model MHL64J/A), macOS 27.0. Every number on this site was measured on this one Mac. Whether an AI runs at all comes down mostly to how much memory you have.

Not just text: AI that makes images can also run inside your own Mac. Nothing is sent over the internet, and there is no charge no matter how many you make. On this page, popular image AI models are given the same prompts on the mothership Mac Studio, and the time they take and the results are compared.

Speed and memory by model

  • Z-Image Turbo by Alibaba (Tongyi-MAI): about 19.7 s per image from the second one, about 22.1 s for the first, 18.5GB of memory, Japanese text not written
  • FLUX.2 [klein] 4B by Black Forest Labs: about 5 s per image from the second one, about 6.5 s for the first, 16.7GB of memory, Japanese text not written
  • ERNIE-Image Turbo by Baidu: about 22.8 s per image from the second one, about 26.6 s for the first, 21.6GB of memory, Japanese text written
  • Qwen-Image by Alibaba (Qwen): about 127 s per image from the second one, about 133.4 s for the first, 37.3GB of memory, Japanese text not written

Click an image to see it larger. Every image was made by AI and differs from real places and things.

To try it on your own Mac (Draw Things)
  1. Install Draw Things. Search the Mac App Store for “Draw Things” and install it (free). It works with buttons and text boxes, so you don't need Terminal.
  2. Pick a model. Choose one from the app's model list, for example “FLUX.2 [klein] 4B” or “Z-Image Turbo”. The first time, the model downloads (from a few GB to 10GB or more).
  3. Describe the image and generate. Write a description of the image you want in the text box (the prompt) and press the generate button. Most models follow descriptions in English more closely.

The measurements on this page use a different tool that runs the same models (mflux). In Draw Things, speed and results can vary with the settings. Draw Things can also generate in the cloud; to keep everything on your Mac, don't use that feature and download the model instead.

How it was measured
  • Tool: each model runs under the same conditions in mflux, an image generation tool for the Mac.
  • First image: the time from loading the model until the first image is done. A guide to how long you wait the first time you try it.
  • From the second: the time per image when making several in a row.
  • Memory: the most memory used while making images (including the image processing part). The amount of used memory kept around for reuse is capped at 2GB for every model.
  • Japanese text: for the sign prompt, whether “こんにちは” (hello) was drawn is judged automatically by reading the image with the Mac's built-in text recognition (Vision). No person checks it, so garbled characters can be misread or misjudged.
  • Quantization: each model is quantized (made lighter) ahead of time and saved, and that saved copy is loaded. This is the same way you use the lighter model versions you can download in apps.
  • Images are 1024×1024, made with the same random number (seed) for every prompt.
  • Only models under a license that lets their images be published freely (Apache 2.0) are shown.
  • Release date: the day the model appeared on Hugging Face (when its repository was created). It can be a little earlier than the announced date.