MiniMax H3-Image 4K Test Takes 547 Seconds on Mac mini

A local test of MiniMax’s H3-Image took 547 seconds to generate a 4K image on an M5 Pro Mac mini, while MiniMax says its hosted service can produce one in less than 10 seconds.

Pratik Gandhi of Eigen Labs ran the local test with ComfyUI and an int8 version of the model, a compressed format that uses less memory. The Mac mini had 64 GB of memory. Gandhi recorded 165 seconds for a 2K image and 90 seconds for a 1K image on the same computer.

A separate deployment configuration using four Nvidia H200 GPUs lists a generation time of 3.84 seconds for an image measuring about 16.8 million pixels. That result comes from different hardware and a different setup than Gandhi’s Mac mini test, so the times are not a like-for-like comparison.

MiniMax’s regular API price is about $0.069 per 4K image. A promotional rate of about $0.034 applies to qualifying requests for outputs of at least 16.6 million pixels. The offer ends at midnight Taiwan time Nov. 18, which is 11 a.m. ET Nov. 17.

H3-Image is an image generation and editing model with downloadable weights. It supports up to 16 reference images for editing and is available through MiniMax’s API, MiniMax Code and Hailuo AI. MiniMax says its hosted service generates a 4K image in under 10 seconds.

The model’s community license restricts use, modification or distribution of the model and generated images in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and South Korea without separate permission from MiniMax. The license’s geographic restrictions also apply to local deployments.