Can the Mac 16 GB run SDXL 1.0?

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 12.9 GB of your 16 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 SDXL file on 12.7 GB

“Needed” adds 1.2 GB of working memory for SDXL and a 0.8 GB reserve. Sizes 2026-10-01. The 6.94 GB checkpoint also holds the two text encoders and the VAE. During sampling only the UNet (about 5.1 GB at 16-bit, 2.6B parameters) has to sit in VRAM, so that is the figure used for the 16-bit file.

03The text encoder

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

04Measured and reported results

05About the Mac 16 GB

A Mac with 16 GB shares that memory between the CPU and the GPU. On current macOS the GPU may use about 12.7 GB of it by default (older macOS versions: about 11.5 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 16 GB: M1, M1 Pro, M2, M2 Pro, M3, M4, M5, M6 (memory bandwidth 68.25–200 GB/s - the higher, the faster). Everything about Macs and local AI →

16 GB unified · ~12.7 GB for the GPU · 68.25–200 GB/s · Apple Silicon. Everything that runs on it →

06Questions