Can the Mac 48 GB run Stable Diffusion 1.5?

01What to download

One file: the checkpoint already contains the text encoders and the VAE. On a Mac, FP8 text encoders do not load, so a 16-bit one is listed. Sizes from Hugging Face, 2026-10-01.

Shared memory: about 8.1 GB of your 48 GB. On this machine the model, the text encoder, the VAE and the operating system all use the same memory. That leaves room, so nothing has to be swapped to disk. calculated

02Every SD 1.5 file on 40.2 GB

“Needed” adds 0.8 GB of working memory for SD 1.5 and a 0.8 GB reserve. Sizes 2026-10-01. The 2.13 GB checkpoint also holds the text encoder and VAE; the UNet alone is about 1.7 GB at 16-bit.

03The text encoder

The text encoder is inside the checkpoint, so there is nothing extra to download.

04Measured and reported results

05About the Mac 48 GB

A Mac with 48 GB shares that memory between the CPU and the GPU. On current macOS the GPU may use about 40.2 GB of it by default (older macOS versions: about 38.7 GB); that is the figure used here. ComfyUI can go past it, but macOS then starts compressing and swapping memory and everything slows down. ComfyUI runs on Apple GPUs through PyTorch's MPS backend. 16-bit and GGUF files work; FP8 and INT8 files do not save memory on a Mac, so they are skipped. Speed is the catch: even the fastest Macs are several times slower per image than a desktop RTX card. Chips sold with 48 GB: M3 Max, M4 Pro, M4 Max, M5 Pro, M5 Max (memory bandwidth 273–614 GB/s - the higher, the faster). Everything about Macs and local AI →

48 GB unified · ~40.2 GB for the GPU · 273–614 GB/s · Apple Silicon. Everything that runs on it →

06Questions