Running a 20B Video Diffusion Transformer on Consumer Hardware: A Deployment and Measurement Report for MiniMax H3 on Apple Silicon
Luke Shi, Steven Shi
Abstract
We report the end-to-end deployment and measurement of MiniMax H3, a 20.38-billion-parameter video diffusion transformer (DiT) - the count measured from the safetensors headers of the Q8 checkpoint as deployed locally (Section 3.2) - running entirely on consumer Apple Silicon hardware: an Apple Mac mini with M5 Pro chip and 64 GiB of unified memory. Using the official bf16-to-Q8 (8-bit, group size 64) quantization path executed locally on the machine, we produced a working text-to-video pipeline with no cloud dependency. We document the full deployment procedure, including two non-trivial blockers and their fixes, and report measured figures for build time, peak memory, and per-clip render latency across four resolution tiers (Draft 384x640 through Native 768x1344). A 15.08-second 576x1024 clip rendered in 4838.49 seconds with a measured MLX peak of 27.467 GiB. We further operated the system as an unattended production pipeline, completing 17 clips in 26.49 hours with zero render failures. A blind human review of the 17 production clips (generation prompts withheld) averaged 3.12, 3.18, and 2.94 out of 5 for structural integrity, temporal consistency, and visible artifacts. All figures in this report are our own measurements except where explicitly labeled as third-party data. This is a systems/empirical report; we make no claim of model innovation.