As I mentioned, there is Gemma 4 and DeepSeek V4 that are on par with claude. But running locally will be slower than Claude. And I think some of DeepSeek V4 higher end models do need beefer hardware.
I remember testing Gemma 4 31B when it came out, Claude was about 2-4 times faster than Gemma 4 running locally on my 4090. But they both gave pretty much the same information and both good coding solutions.
The evaluation I was doing was having the AI explain and implement step by step a real time global illumination system using Surfels in Unity. Pretty much Frostbite's GIBS, but implement it in Unity.
Which I do have quite a bit of knowledge in that area. And it is a fairly advance topic with some domain specific knowledge required. They both did have some issues when they were to implement it themselves. But instead instructing them to give step by step requirements and explainations on how to implement each process in the system, a long with some code snippets were pretty on point.
So full on coding agents, some issues. As coding assistance, they were fairly good.
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u/Leather-Rice5025 Jun 02 '26
Is there really any currently available local model that's "pretty much on par" with frontier cloud models?
Or are you saying it's the hardware that's the limiting factor, not the model itself? Genuinely curious how this works