We thought our own RAM requirement was too high. We measured it.
- Outlier Vision is a 19 GB download and lists a 24 GB minimum memory requirement.
- That looked conservative, and a lower number would let more Macs run it. So we measured instead of arguing.
- Peak resident memory during real image work: 22.22 GB.
- 1.78 GB of headroom on a machine that is also running a browser and your editor is not headroom. The 24 GB stayed.
Published minimum requirements are usually marketing rounded up, so it is reasonable to assume ours were too. Lowering the Vision floor from 24 GB to 20 GB would have made the tier available on a much larger set of machines, which is a real commercial reason to want the number to be wrong.
What we did
Ran Vision on actual image tasks and watched peak resident memory rather than reasoning from the file size. The download is 19 GB. Peak was 22.22 GB. Weights are not the whole cost: the image encoder, the decoded image itself, the key-value cache and the runtime all sit on top, and the peak is what determines whether a machine survives, not the average.
Why 22.22 does not mean 24 was wrong
A requirement is not a measurement of the best case. It is a promise about the worst case on a machine doing other things. On a 24 GB Mac, 22.22 GB leaves 1.78 GB for the operating system, the browser you asked the question about, and whatever else is open. That is not comfortable. It is the edge of swapping, and swapping on a model this size turns a fast answer into a stalled one.
Rounding the floor down would have moved the failure from "this tier is not available on your Mac", which is disappointing but clear, to "this tier is available and sometimes grinds to a halt", which is worse. We left it at 24 GB.
The general point
We started with a suspicion that flattered us and would have grown our addressable machines. Measuring it cost an afternoon and the answer was no. That is the ordinary outcome of checking, and it is the reason to check.
The same discipline applies when you read anyone's requirements, including ours. Ask whether the number describes weights on disk or peak memory in use, and whether it was measured while the machine was doing something else.
Method
- Model: Outlier Vision, 35B mixture-of-experts with 3.6B active, MLX 4-bit, 19 GB on disk.
- Peak resident set size measured during image analysis on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio: 22.22 GB.
- Catalog minimum: 24 GB unified memory. Unchanged after measurement.
- Vision answers questions about images. Text-only questions are routed to a text tier instead, so this measurement covers the work the tier is actually for.
Outlier runs on your own Mac, and its stated requirements are the ones we measured. The FAQ lists what each tier needs, and support is one person.