Introducing Lightning Draft: interactive image generation on M5 Max
M5 Max breakthrough performance makes state-of-the-art image generation feel immediate.
M5 Max, which shipped in early March, delivers breakthrough AI performance, with more than a 3.3× speed-up over M4 Max. This is the kind of previously unseen performance we are now seeing on Apple Silicon.
Interactive image generation and editing are not new. But existing approaches come with compromises. You either have to rely on older, heavily distilled models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 or SDXL, reduce resolution or step count, or run on cloud hardware such as H100s at hourly rates.
In v1.20260323.0, Draw Things introduces Lightning Draft. With Lightning Draft enabled on M5 Max, you can run state-of-the-art models such as FLUX.2 [klein] 4B, 9B, or Z-Image Turbo at their recommended settings with interactive latency of around or under one second locally. This makes prompt iteration dramatically easier and opens up new forms of creative exploration that were not practical before.
In the same v1.20260323.0 release, we also continued shipping performance improvements for M5 chips. With a clearer understanding of the Neural Accelerators’ performance characteristics, we improved our MatMul kernel by roughly another 10% on M5 for large matrices. In practice, that translates into about a 2% to 5% speed gain for larger models such as FLUX.2 [dev] and LTX-2.3 22B.
Today marks the first day of our release week. More updates are coming throughout the week. Stay tuned!