Yes — with 176.0 GB to spare

Gemma 4 26B-A4B at Q4_K_M fits your M3 Ultra · 256 GB entirely in unified memory at 8K context, at an estimated 98 tokens per second. There is room for its full 256K window.

Fully in unified memory 8K context Q4_K_M · 14.9 GB Apache 2.0 Released 2 Apr 2026 Vision

Mixture of experts with 3.8B active. Slower to think than Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, faster to answer, and it sees images.

What hardware do I need for Gemma 4 26B-A4B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 14.9 GB

Weights 14.9 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.51 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 176.0 GB of 192.0 GB

Quantisation ladder

Quant	Weights	Total @ 8K	Max context	Tok/s	Quality	Fit
Q8_0	26.2 GB	27.3 GB	256K	55	−0.1% ppl	Long context
Q6_K	20.2 GB	21.3 GB	256K	72	−0.4% ppl	Long context
Q5_K_M	17.5 GB	18.6 GB	256K	83	−0.8% ppl	Long context
Q4_K_M	14.9 GB	16.0 GB	256K	98	−1.9% ppl	Recommended
Q3_K_M	12.1 GB	13.2 GB	256K	121	−5.4% ppl	Long context
Q2_K	10.3 GB	11.4 GB	256K	141	−15% ppl	Long context

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it. This model interleaves sliding-window layers (1024 tokens, 5 of 30 layers global), which is why its cache barely grows with context.

How to run it

Ollama llama.cpp LM Studio MLX

terminal

$ pip install mlx-lm
$ mlx_lm.generate --model mlx-community/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-4bit \
    --max-tokens 512 --prompt "Hello"

Apple's own array framework. The fastest path on Apple Silicon. More on MLX.

01Download is 14.9 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.

02macOS caps what the GPU may wire down at about 192.0 GB of 256 GB. Raising it with iogpu.wired_limit_mb is possible, and risky.

03There is room to go to the model's full 256K context on this card.

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