Can a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB run Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct?

Yes

Yes. At Q4_K_M it needs 15.52 GB of the 96 GB available and generates around 11.3 tokens per second at an 8k context window.

The numbers

Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct has 25.81 billion parameters across 30 layers. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB has 128 GB of unified memory at 256 GB/s, of which about 96 GB is left for a model once the operating system has taken its share.

QuantisationTotal neededFitsSpeed
Q8_0 26.55 GB yes 6.5 t/s
Q6_K 20.72 GB yes 8.3 t/s
Q5_K_M 18.1 GB yes 9.6 t/s
Q4_K_M 15.52 GB yes 11.3 t/s
IQ4_XS 13.78 GB yes 12.8 t/s
Q3_K_M 12.76 GB yes 13.9 t/s
IQ3_XXS degraded 10.2 GB yes 17.6 t/s
Q2_K degraded 11.07 GB yes 16.2 t/s
IQ2_XXS degraded 7.2 GB yes 25.9 t/s

9 of the 9 levels fit. Levels marked degraded are listed for completeness, not as advice.

How long a conversation it holds

At Q4_K_M, memory rises with the length of the conversation because the attention cache keeps a key and value for every token. The longest window that still fits on this device is 256k tokens.

ContextCacheTotalFits
4k 0.23 GB 15.43 GB yes
8k 0.23 GB 15.52 GB yes
16k 0.23 GB 15.69 GB yes
32k 0.23 GB 16.04 GB yes
64k 0.23 GB 16.72 GB yes
128k 0.23 GB 18.1 GB yes

See how fast it feels

Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB running Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct at Q4_K_M

Wait for the first word2.2 s
Then writes at11.3 tok/s
Whole answer18 s

YouWhy does my model use more memory when the conversation gets longer?

Model

Because of the KV cache. Every token you send leaves behind a key and a value vector in each layer of the model, and those stay in memory for as long as the conversation lasts.

The weights are a fixed cost: load a 4-bit 8B model and that is about 4.8 GB, whether you write one word or ten thousand. The cache is the part that grows, and it grows in a straight line with the number of tokens in the window.

How steeply depends on the model's attention design. With grouped-query attention, several query heads share one key-value pair, which cuts the cache by that ratio. Without it, every head keeps its own, and a long context can cost more memory than the weights themselves.

If you are short on memory, the first thing to try is lowering the context window in your runtime, not the quantisation.

Simulated from our estimate at a 512-token question, not a recording. Assumes nothing else is competing for the GPU. The same answer on RTX 4090 at Q6_K would take about 4.4 s.

Keep going

Everything the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB runs, the full breakdown for Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct, or check a different pairing in the calculator.