Apple M2 Max meets the minimum VRAM requirement for Q4 inference of deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B. Review the quantization breakdown below to see how higher precision settings impact VRAM and throughput.
Apple M2 Max can run deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with Q4 quantization. At approximately 53 tokens/second, you can expect Good speed - acceptable for interactive use.
You have 93GB headroom, which is sufficient for system overhead and smooth operation.
| Quantization | VRAM needed | VRAM available | Estimated speed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 | 3GB | 96GB | 52.64 tok/s | ✅ Fits comfortably |
| Q8 | 5GB | 96GB | 38.52 tok/s | ✅ Fits comfortably |
| FP16 | 11GB | 96GB | 19.51 tok/s | ✅ Fits comfortably |