Three open-weight models, one RTX 5090, and the same jobs: a real bug, playable games, tool calling, long documents. Measured numbers, two defaults that were quietly breaking the results, and the finding we published wrong and had to correct.
Everyone’s arguing about Wan 2.2. So we ran it locally, honestly, the fast-and-fits 5B, the heavy two-expert 14B, the VRAM wall, and the decode that wedges. Here are the real numbers.
VRAM first, everything else second: what GPU you actually need for local AI in 2026, the memory-crisis market, the value picks, AI appliances like DGX Spark, four real builds by budget, and when renting beats buying.
The images, the video, the 3D avatar and the daily uploads on this channel run on one prebuilt gaming PC. Here’s the exact spec, what actually matters for local AI, and what we’d change.
MuseTalk generates lip-synced video faster than real time on a 5090, but getting it to BUILD on Blackwell is dependency hell. Here’s the exact recipe that works.